Spartacist (English) 1972-1980 #21-30

SPARTACJ5T

English Edition

Autumn 1972 to Autumn 1980
(Issues Nos. 21 to 30)

Published by: Spartacist Publishing Co.
Box 1 377 GPO, New York, NY 1 01 1 6

e^GCC/IB^^ 1087-M

Digitized

by tine Internel

t Arcliive

in 2013

http://archive.org/details/spartacist04unse

The Road from the SWP to Trotskyism . . . page 2
The Faces of Economism . . . page 24

SPARTAOST

NUMBER 21

FALL 1972

25 CENTS

The SWP and the Fourth International, 1946-54:

Genesis of Pabloism

The American Socialist Workers Party and the European
Pabloists travelled at different rates along different paths to
revisionism, to converge in uneasy alliance in the early 1960's
in an unprincipled "reunification," which has now broken
down as the American SWP has completed the transition
from Pabloist centrism to outright reformism. The "United
Secretariat" which issued out of the 1963 "reunification"
teeters on the edge of an open split; the "anti-revisionist"
"International Committee" fractured last year. The collapse
of the various competing pretenders to the mantle of the
Fourth International provides a crucial opportunity for the
reemergence of an authentic Trotskyist international tenden-
cy. Key to the task of reconstructing the Fourth Internation-
al through a process of splits and fusions is an understanding
of the characteristics and causes of Pabloist revisionism and
the flawed response of the anti-Pabloists who fought, too
little and too late, on national terrain while in practice
abandoning the world movement.

World War II: U.S. and France

Before the onset of the war, Trotsky and the Fourth
International had believed that decaying capitalism and the
rise of fascism removed the possibility for reformism and
therefore for bourgeois-democratic illusions among the
masses. Yet' they could not but become fncreasingly aware
that the revulsion of the working class against fascism and
the threat of fascist occupation gave rise to social chauvinism
and a renewal of confidence in the "democratic" bourgeoisie
permeating the proletarian masses throughout Europe and the
U.S. Faced with such a contradiction, the powerful pressures
of nationalist backwardness and democratic illusions in the
working class tended to pull the sections of the Fourth
International apart, some adopting a sectarian stance, others
capitulating to the social patriotism which was rampant
among the masses. The SWP briefly adopted the "Proletarian

Military Policy" which called for military training under -
trade union control, implicitly posing the Utopian idea that
U.S. workers could fight German fascism without the
existence of a workers state in the U.S., through "control-
ling" U.S. imperialism's army. British Trotskyist Ted Grant
went even further, in one speech referring to British
imperialism's armed forces as "our Eighth Army." The
German IKD returned to outright Menshevism with the
theory that fascism had brought about the need for "an
intermediate stage fundamentally equivalent to a democratic
revolution." ("Three Theses," 19 October 1941)

The French Trotskyist movement, fragmented during the
course of the war, was the best example of the contradiction.
One of its fragments subordinated the mobilization of the
working class to the political appetites of the GauUist wing of
the imperialist bourgeoisie; another grouping renounced any
struggle within the resistance movement in favor of work
exclusively at the point of production and, not recognizing
the existing level- of reformist consciousness among the
workers, adventurously attempted to seize the factories
during the "liberation" of Paris while the working masses
were out on the streets. The February 1944 European
Conference document which was the basis for a fusion
between two French groupings to form the Parti Com-
muniste Internationaliste characterized the two groups:

"Instead of distinguishing between the nationalism of the
defeated bourgeoisie which remains an expression of its
imperialist preoccupations, and the 'nationalism' of the
masses which is only a reactionary expression of their
resistance against exploitation by the occupying imperial-
ism, the leadership of the POI considered as progressive
the struggle of its own bourgeoisie . . . ."

"the CCI . . . under the pretext of guarding intact the
heritage of Marxism-Leninism, refused obstinately to

(Continued on page 4)

The Case of Bala Tampoe

Suppressed Documents Expose United Secretariat

PAGE 14

2

SPARTACIST

The Road from the SWP
to Trotskyism

Resignations from
the SWP-YSA

The statement of resignation from the Socialist Workers
Party in favor of a fusion perspective with the Spartacist
League, printed immediately below, is from comrades who
have made the difficult transition from the reformism of the
SWP to Trotskyism. They originated out of the complex pro-
cess around the last SWP Convention (August 1971). Two
left oppositions emerged in that Convention period: the
Communist Tendency in Boston, a handful associated with
one David Fender, and the much looser Proletarian Orienta-
tion tendency which amassed perhaps a hundred supporters
byConventiorttime.The CT took a more left-wing and multi-
faceted stance; the PO as its name implies centered upon in-
volving the SWP in the working-class movement. After the
Convention the PO formally dissolved and in fact began dis-
integrating even before the post-Convention period. Of the
older more prominent individuals drawn to or associated
with the PO (Larry Turner, Hedda Garza, Harry DeBoer, Paul
Boutelle), most simply capitulated to the party majority. The
surviving right PO elements headed by Ralph Lewis seem to
place their future hopes on the centrist European United Sec-
retariat in the latter's incipient rupture with the reformist
American SWP. The more radical left PO elements around
Barbara Gregorich formally constituted a "Leninist Faction"
within the SWP.

Meanwhile Fender and the CT early got themselves
thrown out of the SWP, then spHt from each other. The CT,
after a weeks-long attempt to conquer the American prole-
tariat, independently as the "Committee for a Workers Gov-
ernment," liquidated into the third-camp International So-
cialists, though not without swearing to all and sundry that
they have not sold out but are rather on a vicious wrecking
Trotskyite entry. Fender has signed on as co-editor of Harry
Turner's "Vanguard Newsletter" to produce one of the more
rotten little blocs of all time. The VNL is not only non-
democratic-centralist itself ')ut projects and seeks to work
through its "Committees for Rank and File Caucuses," a hy-
pothetical united front in willful substitution for the aim of
a Leninist party. The record of the combined VNL-CRFC
crew to date, to take the China question for example, is the
"unity" of the pro-Maoist Turner and the pro-Liu Shao-chiist
Fender, along with the sometime inclusion of the self-styled
left pro-Lin Piaoist Bob Ross. In addition the CRFC swamp
encompasses "Socialist Forum," some semi-ex-DeLeonist

14 August 1972

Political Committee, Socialist Workers Party
National Executive Committee,
Young Socialist Alliance

We, the undersigned, hereby rdsign from the SWP
and the YSA. We take this step as the culmination of
our previously declared support within the SWP to the
Declaration of the Leninist Faction of 15 May 1972
or, in the case of the YSA member, of our present
solidarity with the politics of that Declaration

In accordance with the programmatic parallelism
of our political position with that of the Spartacist
League of the U.S., and as principled and serious
revolutionists, we intend to seek fusion with the SL.
We call upon all others in basic agreement with our
views to adopt the same perspective.

Fraternally,

Paul A., SWP ( Washington D. C. );
JeffB., SWP(0akland-Berkeley1
Dave P.,SWP( Washington, D. C )
Martha P., SWP ( Washington, D. C. )
Ron P, YSA (New York City)

elements who presumably think all the Chinese are simply
Stalinist totalitarians but that probably it is not very im-
portant since it is not an American question. Just before
picking up Fender who is some kind of extreme "socialist"
militarist i.e. an enthusiast of his own version of an ultra
Proletarian Military Policy, Turner had fortuitously broken,
over questions of international maneuvering, with a "social-
ist" draft dodger. Bob Sherwood, resident in Canada. But
Turner-Fender do have a principled basis of a sort for their
amalgam: Turner's VNL had gone along with support to the
New York cops' strike (Turner was chasing the strongly pro-
cop Workers League at the time) while most recently Fender
as a VNL representative precipitated the forcible opening by
campus cops of a WL "public" meeting in St. Louis where, as
usual, the WL was forcibly excluding known radical op-
ponents.

The record of the attempt of elements standing between
the reformism of the "Trotskyist" SWP and the revolutionary
Marxism of the Trotskyist Spartacist League to transcend
their centrist limitations ranges in the main from the pathetic
to the sordid.

The most characteristic nostrum seen as an antidote to
the SWP's revisionism is a particularly trivial species of work-
erism. Real revolutionary syndicahsts, while they believe in

FALL 1972

3

SPARTAC)5T

(Fourth Internationalist)
An Organ of Revolutionary Marxism

EDITORS: Managing, Elizabeth Gordon; James Robertson;
Joseph Sevmour.

BUSINESS MANAGER: Anne Keiley.

Main address: Box 1377, G.P.O., New York, N.Y. 10001. Tele-
phone: WA 5-2426. Western address: P.O. Box 852, Berkeley,
Calif. 94701. Telephone: 848-3029. Southern address: Box
51 634, Main P.O., New Orleans, La. 701 51 . Telephone: 866-8384.
New England address: Box 188, M.l.T. Sta., Cambridge, Mass.
02139. Telephone: 876-1787. Midwestern address: Box 6471,
Main P.O., Chicago, III. 60680. Telephone: 548-2934.

Published by the Central Committee of the Spartacist League.
Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent
an editorial viewpoint.

Number 21 ^liSS^ x 523 Fall 1972

concentrating all their effort and attention upon the class
struggle at the point of production hence denying and liqui-
dating crucial aspects of Leninism in the struggle to conquer
power, at least focus on the class struggle. But much of the
thrust of the oppositions born in the SWP is instead a
yearning to be "at one" with the proletariat, a sentimental
petty-bourgeois moralist felt belief that the be-all and end-all
of the work of real revolutionists is simply to be immersed,
hopefully continuously, in the real proletarian milieu—very
different from the Leninist implantation of hard communist
fractions at calculated spots within the labor movement.

The SWP oppositionists' disorientation reflects two inter-
connected deep-seated obstacles to achieving a bona fide rev-
■olutionary outlook. The first is that the SWP is very far from
revolutionary politics, and in very many ways-hence the
road from it to Trotskyism is long and tortuous. The second
is that the American working class in recent decades has
given little concrete empirical example of its real capacities in
class struggle to the isolated panacea- and revisionism-prone
radical movement. Hence it is difficult for even those with a
subjective will to assimilate the historical and international
experiences of Bolshevism and Trotskyism. But if experience
in revolutionary politics is not easy to acquire in contempora-
ry America, the catastrophes of petty centrist opportunism
can and do teach a minority of revolutionary aspirants the
lessons through hard knocks. The comrades now resigning
from the SWP are by no means the last to come to Bolshev-
ism from the still continuing interactions of the floundering
SWP oppositional elements as they are driven to confront
real programmatic alternatives.

Declaration of
Leninist Faction

1. As Trotskyists we are first and foremost proletarian
internationalists. Today, though, we see not one single,

homogeneous Fourth International (World Party of Socialist
Revolution), but five separate international groups all
claiming to be either the Fourth International itself, or
separate "factions" of it. The shattering of the Fourth Inter-
national originally constructed by Trotsky, Cannon, Sedov,
Klement, and others had its basis in the isolation from the
working masses after World War II, and the methodology and
positions adopted at the Third World Congress in 195 1 .

At the Third World Congress, adaptation to non-revolu-
tionary currents took place, which resulted in the adoption
of positions which negated the need for the Leninist vanguard
party. These positions, based on impressionism and empiri-
cism, were not decisively fought at the time of the 1952-53
split nor during the reunification of 1963. The result is that
they still exist within the United Secretariat today.

2. The majority of the United Secretariat is currently
adapting to peasant forces in Latin America, while the
Canadian led minority (with fraternal SWP support) seeks to
adapt to petty bourgeois and new middle class sectors. Nei-
ther strategy sees the industrial working class as the key to
the revolution. Therefore, in the current dispute within the
United Secretariat, we can support neither side.

Other international groupings have fared no better. About
the International Secretariat of Posadas with its call for a
nuclear first strike by the Soviet Union, or the Revolutionary

Marxist Tendency of Pablo with its deep entry in the Aus-
tralian Communist Party, little need be said. The Internation-
al Committee, led by G. Healy, can be characterized as both
sectarian and opportunist, or "sectarians afraid of their own
opportunism," with outright reactionary positions on such
issues as women's liberation.

3. Errors similar to those of the United Secretariat are
found within the current program of our party, the Socialist
Workers Party.

(Continued next page)

This is the first issue of Spartacist since the
inauguration of the new monthly Workers
Vanguard a year ago. At that time Workers
Vanguard was described as part of the trans-
formation of the Spartacist League into the
nucleus of the vanguard party, and of the
struggle to reconstruct the Fourth Interna-
tional. The role of Spartacist is to stress
the polemical, theoretical and internation-
ally directed aspects of these tasks. Hence
the editors look forward to Spartacist be-
coming the organ of the Spartacist tendency
internationally, as a step in the struggle for
rebirth of the Fourth International.

—The Editorial Board

4

SPARTACIST

. . . SWP

4. The declaration that the Cuban Revolution had pro-
duced a healthy workers state without the intervention of
the vanguard Leninist (i.e. Trotskyist) party represented a
political denial of the need for such a party. This denial is
outright political liquidationism. We declare that the current
Cuban state is a deformed workers state and has been so
from the very instant of its existence. In order for Cuba to
become a healthy \yorkers state, a political revolution is re-
quired just as in the degenerated workers state of the Soviet
Union and the deformed workers states such as China and
the Eastern European states. Such a political revolution has
as its most important task the estabHshment of institutional-
ized forms of workers democracy and the political destruc-
tion of the Stalinist theories of socialism in one country and
peaceful coexistence.

5. The party majority has come more and more to base its
program on bourgeois ideologies (such as nationalism and
feminism) within the workers' movement. While we support
the liberation of women and of the various national, ethnic,
and racial groups oppressed by U.S. capitalism, we believe
that such liberation will only be achieved by a successful
proletarian revolution within the United States. While the
party's current feminist politics imply that women-as-women
can end their oppression, and its nationalist politics imply
that nations as nations can end national oppression, we say
that this is a poly-vanguardist approach. Only the working
class, organized as a class and led by the vanguard party can
liberate all humanity. Consequently, our most important task
is to further the development of class consciousness which
will link all sectors of the working class in a common struggle
against the oppression that the various groups within the
class currently face. We do not simply oppose such ideologies
as feminism and nationalism. Rather, the nationalists and
feminists are conscious of their oppression, but with a false
consciousness (i.e., an ideology). What is necessary is to
utilize the strategy contained in The Death Agony of Capi-
talism and the Tasks of the Fourth International to destroy
this false consciousness and replace it with its opposite by
raising it to a qualitatively higher level-from bourgeois
ideology to revolutionary class consciousness.

6. While we give unconditional support to the miUtary
battle being waged by the Vietnamese against United States
imperialism, a revolutionary defense of the Vietnamese Rev-
olution requires both its defense against the StaHnist bureauc-
racy as well as U.S. imperialism. Such a defense requires the
preparation of the proletariat for its historic task of seizing
state power. The party approaches the question of the war in
a single-issue pacifist fashion. The party has not begun to
build a mass movement that can defend the Vietnamese rev-
olution, either from imperiaUsm or its StaHnist misleader-
ship. The majority sees no need to defend the Revolution
against the Stalinist bureaucracy currently in the leadership
of the struggle. Having seen the bureaucracy sell out the in-
terests of the Vietnamese workers in the past, we will see
them continue to do so in the future, until the struggle

(Continued on page 13)

. . . Pahloism (Continued from page 1)

distinguish the nationalism of the bourgeoisie from the
resistance movement of the masses."

I. SWP ISOLATIONISM

European Trotskyism and American Trotskyism respond-
ed in initially different ways to different tasks and problems
following World War II. The precarious internationalism of
the American SWP, maintained through intimate collabora-
tion with Trotsky during his exile in Mexico, did not survive
the assassination of Trotsky in 1940 and the onset of world
war. The American Trotskyists retreated into an isolation
only partially forced upon them by the disintegration of the
European sections under conditions of fascist triumph and
illegalization.

Anticipating the difficulties of international coordination
during the war, a resident International Executive Committee
had been set up in New York. Its only notable achievement,
however, appears to have been the convening of an "Emer-
gency Conference" of the International, held 19-26 May
1940 "somewhere in the Western Hemisphere," "on the
initiative of its U.S., Mexican and Canadian sections." A
rump conference attended by less than half of the sections,
the "Emergency Conference" was called for the purpose of
dealing with the internatiorial ramifications of the Shacht-
man split in the U.S. section, which had resulted in the
defection of a majority of the resident lEC. The meeting
solidarized with the SWP in the faction fight and reaffirmed
its status as the one U.S. section of the Fourth International.
The conference also adopted a "Manifesto of the Fourth
International on the Imperialist War and the Proletarian
World Revolution" written by Trotsky. Following Trotsky's
death, however, the resident lEC lapsed into oblivion.

At least in hindsight, the American section of the Fourth
International should have initiated a clandestine secretariat in
a neutral country in Europe, staffed by quahfied SWPers and
emigres from other sections, to centralize and directly
supervise the work of Trotskyists in fascist-occupied coun-
tries. But the SWP -vas content to limit its international
activities during the war to the publication in its internal
bulletins of letters and factional documents from European
Trotskyists. The passage of the Voorhis Act in 1941
inhibiting U.S. groups from affiliation with international
political organizations-a law which to this day has never
been tested-also gave the SWP a -rationalization for down-
playing its international responsibilities.

The SWP's work during the war did evidence an interna-
tionalist perspective. SWP longshoremen used the opportuni-
ty of ships from Vladivostok docking on the West Coast to
clandestinely distribute Trotsky's "Letter to Russian Work-
ers" in Russian to the Soviet seamen. The SWP concentrated
its merchant marine comrades on the supply runs to Mur-
mansk until the extremely heavy casualties compelled the
party to discontinue the Murmansk concentration. (It was in
response to such activities that the GPU was directed to acti-
vate the Soblen anti-Trotskyist espionage net. Testimony
years afterward revealed that Cannon's telephone was tapped
by the GPU and that the business manager of the SWP's
Fourth Internationa! magazine, one "Michael Cort," was one

FALL 1972

5

of the GPU agents.) But the maintenance and direction of
the Fourth International was part of the SWP's internation-
alist responsibiUty, and should have been a priority as urgent
as the work which the SWP undertook on its own.

The leadership of the SWP came through the war period
essentially intact, but reinforced in its insularity and ill-
equipped theoretically to deal with the post-war situation.

During the later years of the war and the immediate
post-war period, the SWP had registered some impressive
successes in implanting its cadres in industry during the
boom and in recruiting a new layer of proletarian militants
drawn to the Trotskyists because of their opposition to the
Communist Party's policies of social patriotism and class
peace.

Optimism and Orthodoxy

The SWP entered the post-war period with buoyant
optimism about the prospects for proletarian revolution. The
1946 SWP Convention and its resolution, "The Coming
American Revolution," projected the indefinite continuation
of successes for the SWP. The isolationist perspective of the
Party was in evidence at the Convention. The necessarily
international character of crises and revolutions is recogniz-
ed, but not the concomitant international character of the
vanguard party. The resolution in effect makes excuses for
the political backwardness of the U.S. working class while
praising its militancy and presents the following syllogism:
the decisive battles of the world revolution will be fought in
the advanced countries where the means of production are
highly developed and the proletariat powerful-above all in
the U.S.; therefore all that is necessary is to build the
American revolution and world capitalism will be over-
thrown. Profound impressionism led the SWP to see the
world through the eyes of American capitalism which had
emerged from the war as the unquestioned pre-eminent
capitalist world power.

The post-war stabilization of European capitalism, the
emergence of the Stalinist parties as the dominant reformist
workers parties in Europe, the expansion of Stalinism in
Eastern Europe (apparently flying in the face of the
Trotskyist analysis that Stalinism could only betray), the
destruction of capitalism by peasant-based nationalist-
Stalinist formations in Yugoslavia and China— all these
developments posed new theoretical problems for the
-Trotskyist movement which the SWP, stripped of a layer of
talented intellectuals by the petty-bourgeois Shachtman split
and shortly thereafter deprived of Trotsky's guidance, could
not handle. The SWP's immediate response was to retreat
into a sterile "orthodoxy" stripped of real theoretical
content, thus rendering its isolation more complete.

The 1950's brought a new wave of spontaneous working-
class struggles in West and East Europe, but to the SWP they
brought the onset of the Cold War witchhunt: the Smith Act
prosecutions of CPers and former CPers; the deadening of
every aspect of social and intellectual life; the relentless
purge of known "reds" and militants from the union
movement, severing the SWP's connection with the working-
class movement which had taken years to build up; the
dropping away of the whole layer of workers recruited to the
SWP during the late 1940's. The objective pressure to
become a mere cheering sectibn for European and colonial

developments was strong but the SWP hung on to its verbal
orthodox commitment to making the American revolution.

II. THE BREAK IN CONTINUITY IN EUROPE

The vulnerability of the European Trotskyist movement
to revisionism hinged on the historic weaknesses of the
European organizations combined with the thorough shatter-
ing of their continuity to the earlier period. When Trotsky in
1934 launched the struggle to found the Fourth Internation-
al, the European working class, confronted with the decisive
choice of socialism or barbarism, lacked a communist
leadership. The task facing the Fourth Internationalists was
clear: to mobilize the class against the threat of fascism and

"By its very nature opportunism is nationaristic, since it rests
on the local and temporary needs of the proletariat and not
on its historic tasks. Opportunists find international control
intolerable and they reduce their international ties as much
as possible to harmless formalities ... on the proviso that
each group does not hinder the others from conducting an
opportunist policy to its own national task. . . . International
unity is not a decorative facade for us, but the very axis of
our theoretical views and our policy. Meanwhile there are not
a few ultra-Lefts . . . [who] carry on a semi-conscious strug-
gle to split up the Communist Opposition into independent
national groups and to free them from international
control."

(Leon Trotsky, "The Defense ot the Soviet Union and
the Opposition," 7 September 1929)

"We stand not for democracy in general but for centralist
democracy. It is precisely for this reason that we place
national leadership above local leadership and international
leadership above national leadership."

(Leon Trotsky, "An Open Letter to All Members of
the Leninbund," 6 February 1930)

war, to amass the cadres for the world revolutionary party
which would stand for proletarian internationahsm in the
face of the march toward imperialist war and the social
chauvinist capitulation of the Second and Third Internation-
als. But Trotsky had noted the immense difficulty for the
conscious vanguard to go forward in a period of crushing
defeat for the class and the "terrible disproportion between
the tasks and the means." ("Fighting Against the Stream,"
April 1939) The weakness of the European movement was
exemplified by the French section, which was repeatedly
criticized by Trotsky and whose petty-bourgeois "workerist"
deviation and dilettantism were the subject of a special
resolution at the founding conference of the Fourth Interna-
tional in 1938.

The Fourth International geared itself up for the decisive
struggle against fascism and war^and lost. During the course
of the war and the Nazi occupations the very rudiments of
international, and even national, coordination were destroy-
ed: The International disintegrated into small groups of
miUtants pursuing improvised policies: some opportunist,
some heroic. The 65 French and German comrades who were

(Continued^ext page)

6

SPARTACIST

. . . Pabloism

shot by the Gestapo in July 1 943 because of their revolution-
ary defeatist fraternization and the building of a Trotskyist
cell in the German armed forces are a monument to the
internationalist courage of a weak revolutionary movement
fighting against insurmountable odds.

Trotskyist Cadres Decimated

In August 1943 an attempt was made to reestablish the
rudiments of organization in Europe. The European Secre-
tariat set up at this meeting in Belgium included exactly one
surviving member of the pre-war leadership and largely as a
result of the nonexistence of tested cadres, Michel Pablo
(Raptis), a skilled clandestine organizer not known for ability
as a political leader or theoretician, emerged as the head of
the International. When in June 1945 a European Executive
Committee met to prepare for the holding of a World
Congress, the experienced leading cadres and the most
promising of the young Trotskyists (A. Leon, L. Lesoil, W.
Held) had been killed at the hands of the Nazis or the GPU.
The continuity of Trotskyism in Europe had been broken.
This tragic process was duplicated elsewhere with the
imprisonment and eventual execution of Ta Thu-tau and the
Vietnamese Trotskyists, the virtual extinction of the Chinese
Trotskyists and the liquidation of the remaining Russian
Trotskyists (including, besides Trotsky, Ignace Reiss, Rudolf
Klement and Leon Sedov). The Europeans were apparently
so starved for experienced leading cadres that Pierre Frank
(leading member of the Molinier group which Trotsky
denounced as "demoralized centrists" in 1935 and expelled
in 1938 for refusing to break with the French social-
democracy after the "French Turn") was enabled to become
a leader of the post-war French section.

At this crucial juncture the intervention and leadership of
a truly internationalist American Trotskyist party might have
made a great difference. But the SWP, which should have
assumed leadership in the International throughout the war
years, was sunk in its own national preoccupations. Cannon
noted later that the SWP leadership had deliberately built up
Pablo's authority, even going "so f^r as to soft-pedal a lot of
our differences" (June 1953). The urgent responsibility oif
the SWP, which whatever its deficiencies was the strongest
and most experienced Trotskyist organization, was precisely
the opposite.

III. ORTHODOXY REASSERTED

The immediate task facing the Trotskyists after the war
was to reorient its cadres and reassess -the situation of the
vanguard and the class in light of previous projections. The
Trotskyists' expectations of tottering West European capital-
ist regimes and the renewal of violent class struggle through-
out Europe, and especially in Germany where the collapse of
Nazi state power left a vacuum, had been confirmed.
However the reformists, particularly the Stalinist parties,
reasserted themselves to contain the spontaneous working-
class upsurges. Control of the French working class through
the CGT passed from the social democracy (SFIO) which had
controlled the CGT before the war to the French Stalinists.
Thus despite the manifest revolutionary spirit of the
European- working class and the great waves of general

strikes, especially in France, Belgium, Greece and Italy,
throughout West Europe, the proletariat did not take power
and the Stalinist apparatus emerged with new strength and
sohdity.

The Fourth International responded by falling back on
sterile orthodoxy and stubborn refusal to believe that these
struggles had been defeated for the immediate period:

"Under these conditions partial defeats . . . temporary
periods of retreat ... do not demoralize the prole-
tariat .... The repeated demonstration by the bourgeoisie
of its inability to restabilize - an economy and political
regime of the slightest stabihty offers the workers new
opportunities to go over to even higher stages of struggle.

"The sweUing of the ranks of the traditional organizations
in Europe, above all the Stalinist parties . . . has reached
its peak almost everywhere. The phase of decline is
beginning."

(European Executive Committee, April 1946)
Right-opportunist critics in the Trotskyist movement (the
German IKD, the SWP's Goldman-Morrow faction) were
correct in noting the over-optimism of such an analysis and
in pointing out that the traditional reformist leaderships of
the working class are always the first inheritors of a renewal
of militancy and struggle. Their "solution," however, was to
argue for a limitation of the Trotskyist program to bour-
geois-democratic demands, and such measures as critical
support to the post-war French bourgeois Constitution. Their
advocacy of an entrist policy toward the European reformist
parties was dismissed out of hand by the majority, which
expected the workers to more or less spontaneously regroup
under the Trotskyist banner. This attitude prepared the way
for a sharp reversal on the entrism question when the implicit
position of ignoring the reformists' influence could no longer
be maintained.

The Fourth International's immediate post-war perspec-
tive was summed up by Ernest Germain (Mandel) in an
article called "The First Phase of the European Revolution"
(Fourth International, August 1946). The title already
implies the outlook: "the revolution" was implicitly redefin-
ed as a metaphysical process enduring continuously and
progressing inevitably toward victory, rather than a sharp and
necessarily time-limited confrontation over the question of
state power, the outcome of which will shape the entire
subsequent period.

Stalinophobia

The later, Pabloist, capitulation to Stalinism was prepared
by impressionistic overstatement of its opposite: Stalino-
phobia. In November 1947 Pablo's International Secretariat
wrote that the Soviet Union had become:

"a workers state degenerated to the point where all
progressive manifestations of the remains of the October
conquest are more and more neutralized by the disastrous
effects of the Stahnist dictatorship."

"What remains of the conquests of October is more and
more losing its Historic value as a premise for socialist
development."

". . . from the Russian occupation forces or from pro-
Stalinist governments, which are completely reactionary,
we do not demand the expropriation of the
bourgeoisie . . . ."

Within the SWP, the rumor circulated that Cannon was
flirting with the characterization that the Soviet Union had
become a totally degenerated workers state, i.e., a "state

FALL 1972

7

capitalist" regime-a position which NataUa Trotsky shortly
embraced.

On the question of the Stalinist expansion into East
Europe, the Fourth International was united in simple-
minded orthodoxy. An extensive discussion of "The Kremlin
in Eastern Europe" (Fourth International, November 1946)
by E. R. Frank (Bert Cochran) was shrill in anti-Stalinist tone
and tended toward the view that the countries occupied by
the Red Army would be deliberately maintained as capitalist
states. A polemic against Shachtman by Germain dated 15
November 1946 was still more categorical: the theory of "a
degenerated workers state being installed in a country where
there has not yet previously been a proletarian revolution" Is
dismissed, simply, as "absurd." And Germain rhetorically
queries, "Does [Shachtman] really think that the Stalinist
bureaucracy has succeeded in overthrowing capitalism in half
of our continent?" (Fourth International, February 1947)

The methodology here is the same as that pursued, more
cynically, by the "International Committee" in later years
over the question of Cuba (perplexed? then deny reality!)
with the difference that the class character of East Europe,
with capitalist economic institutions but the state power held
by the occupying army of a degenerated workers state, was
far more difficult to understand. Empiricists and renegades,
of course, had no difficulty in characterizing the East
European states:

"Everyone knows that' in the countries where the Stalin-
ists have taken power they have proceeded, at one or
another rate of speed, to establish exactly the same
economic, political, social regime as exists in Russia.
Everyone knows that the bourgeoisie has been or is
rapidly being expropriated, deprived of all its economic
power, and in many cases deprived of mortal exis-
tence .... Everyone knows that what remnants of
capitalism remain in those countries will not even be
remnants tomorrow, that the whole tendency is to
establish a social system identical with that of StaUnist
Russia."

(Max Shachtman, "The Congress of the Fourth
International," October 1948 New International)

Excruciating as this ridicule must have been for them,
however, the orthodox Trotskyists were trapped in their
analysis because they could not construct a theory to explain
the East Europe transformation without embracing non-
revolutionary conclusions.

Germain, as was typical for him in those years, at least
posed the theoretical dilemma clearly: is the Trotskyist
understanding of Stalinism correct if Stalinism shows itself
willing in some cases to accomplish any sort of anti-capitalist
social transformation? Clinging to orthodoxy, the Trotskyists
had lost a real grasp of theory and suppressed part of
Trotsky's dialectical understanding of Stalinism as a parasitic
and counter-revolutionary caste sitting atop the gains of the
October Revolution, a kind of treacherous middle-man
poised between the victorious Russian proletariat and world
imperialishi. Having thus reduced dialectical materialism to
static dogma, their disorientation was complete when it
became necessary to answer Germain's question in the
affirmative, and the way was prepared for Pabloist revision-
ism to leap into the theoretical void.

Fourth International Flirts with Tito

Virtually without exception the Fourth International was
disoriented by the Yugoslav revolution. After some twenty

years of Stalinist monolithism, the Trotskyists were perhaps
ill-disposed to scrutinize the anti-Stalin Yugoslav CP too
carefully. The Yugoslav Titoists were described as "com-
rades" and "left centrists," and Yugoslavia as "a workers
state established by a proletarian revolution." In one of
several "Open Letters" to Tito, the SWF wrote: "The
confidence of the masses in it ["your party"] will grow
enormously and it will become the effective collective
expression of the interests and desires of the proletariat of its
country." The Yugoslav revolution posed a new problem
(later recapitulated by the Chinese, Cuban and Vietnamese
experiences): unlike East Europe, where the social trans-
formations were accomplished by the army of a foreign
degenerated workers state, the Yugoslav revolution was
clearly an indigenous social revolution which, without the
intervention of the working class or the direction of a
Trotskyist party, succeeded in establishing a (deformed)
workers state. The Fourth International avoided the theoreti-
cal problem by dubbing the revolution "proletarian" and the
Titoists "left centrists." (The SWF avoided the question of
China by refusing to unambiguously characterize the Maoist
regime as a deformed workers state until 1955. As late as
1954 two articles by the Phillips tendency, characterizing
China as state capitalist, were published in the SWP's Fourth
International.)

Again orthodoxy is maintained but robbed of its content.
The impulse, resisted until Pablo was to give it consistent
expression, was that the ability of non-proletarian, non-
Trotskyist forces to accomplish any form of social overturn
robbed the Fourth International of its reason for existence.
The crucial qualitative distinction between a workers state
and a deformed workers state— demarcated in blood in the
need for political revolution to open the road to sociaHst
development and the extension of the revolution abroad-
had been lost.

IV PABLOISM CONQUERS

The numerically weak, socially isolated, theoretically
unarmed and inexperienced cadres of the post-war Fourth
International were easy prey for disorientation and impa-
tience in a situation of repeated pre-revolutionary upsurges
whose course they could not influence. Beginning in early
1951 a new revisionism, Pabloism, began to assert itself,
responding to the frustrating objective situation by posing an
ersatz way out of the isolation of the Fourth International
from the main motion of the working class. Pabloism was the
generalization of this impulse in a revisionist body of theory
offering impressionistic answers which were more consistent
than the one-sided orthodoxy of the early post-war Fourth
International.

It is crucial that the organizational weakness, lack of deep
roots in the proletariat and theoretical incapacity and
disorientation which were the precondition for the revisionist
degeneration of the Fourth International not be simply
equated with the consolidation and victory of that revision-
ism. Despite grave political errors, the Fourth* International
in the immediate post-war period was still revolutionary. The
SWP and the International clung to sterile orthodoxy as a
talisman to ward off non-revolutionary conclusions from

(Continued next j^age)

8

SPARTACIST

. . . Pabloism

world events which they could no longer comprehend.
History had demonstrated that at crucial junctures revolu-
tionary Marxists have been able to transcend an inadequate
theory: Lenin before April 1917 was theoretically unequip-
ped to project a proletarian revolution in a backward country
like Russia; Trotsky until 1933 had equated the Russian
Thermidor with a return to capitalism. Pabloism was more
than a symmetrical false theory, more than simply an
impressionistic over-reaction against orthodoxy; it was a
theoretical justification for a non-revolutionary impulse
based on giving up a perspective for the construction of a
proletarian vanguard in the advanced or the colonial
countries.

In January 1951 Pablo ventured into thg realm of theory
with a document called "Where Are We Going?" Despite
whole paragraphs of confused crackpotism and virtually
meaningless bombast, the whole revisionist structure
emerges:

"The relation of forces on the international chess-board is
now evolving to the disadvantage of imperialism.

"An epoch of transition between capitalism and socialism,
an epoch which has already begun and is quite advanc-
ed ... . This transformation will probably take an entire
period of several centuries and will in the meantime be
filled with forms and regimes transitional between capital-
ism and socialism and necessarily deviating from 'pure'
forms and norms.

"The objective process is in the final analysis the sole
determining factor, overriding all obstacles of a subjective
order.

"The Communist Parties retain the possibihty in certain
circumstances of roughly outlining a revolutionary orien-
tation."

Pablo's elevation of the "objective process" to "the sole
determining factor" reducing the subjective factor (the
consciousness and organization of the vanguard party) to
irrelevance, the discussion of "several centuries" of "transi-
tion" (later characterized by Pablo's opponents as "centuries
of deformed workers states") and the suggestion that
revolutionary leadership might be provided by the Stalinist
parties rather than the Fourth International— the whole
analytic structure of Pabloist revisionism emerged.

In another document, "The Coming War," Pablo put
forward his poHcy of "entrism sui generis" (entrism of its
own kind):

"In order to integrate ourselves into the real mass
movement, to work and to remain in the masses' trade
unions for example, 'ruses' and 'capitulations' are not
only acceptable but necessary."

In essence, the Trotskyists were to abandon the perspective
of short-term entrism whose purpose had always been to split
the working-class organizations on a hard programmatic basis
as a tactic for building the Trptskyist party. The new entrist
policy flowed directly from Pablo's analysis. Since the
asserted shift in the world relationship of forces in favor of
the advance of the revolution would compel the StaHnist
parties to play a revolutionary role, it was only logical that
the Trotskyists should be a part of such parties pursuing
essentially a pohcy of pressuring the StaUnist apparatus.
All this should have exploded a bomb in the heads of the

international Trotskyist cadres. Pablo was after all the head
of the International Secretariat, the resident pohtical body of
the Fourth International! But there is httle evidence of even
alarm, let alone the formation of the international anti-
revisionist faction which was required. One long document
by Ernest Germain ("Ten Theses"), and perhaps some
subterranean rumbling, did force Pablo to produce an
attempt at orthodoxy on the question of the "transitional
period" but no other Uterary notice was taken of Pablo's
most overt assault against the program of Trotskyism.

Germain Resists

In March 1951 Germain produced "Ten Theses," which
was a veiled attack on "Where Are We Going?" but did not
attack Pablo or the document by name. Germain restated the
Marxist use of "transitional period" as the period between the
victory of the revolution (the dictatorship of the proletariat)
and the achievement of sociahsm (the classless society).
Without any expUcit reference to Pablo's position, he wrote:
"No more than the bourgeoisie will it [Stahnism] survive a
war which will be transformed into a world upsurge of the
revolution." Germain insisted on the contradictory Bona-
partist character of Stalinism, based on proletarian property
forms while safeguarding the privileged position of the
bureaucracy against the workers. He emphasized the dual
nature of the mass CPs outside the USSR as determined by
their proletarian base on the one hand and their subservience
to the Stalinist bureaucracies in power on the other.

Germain attempted to present the orthodox response to
the Pabloist. impulse that the destruction of capitaUsm in
Eastern Europe, China and Yugoslavia without a Trotskyist
leadership made the Fourth International superfluous. Again,
he did not refer to the positions he was attacking; one would
have thought that the 'Ten Theses" simply dropped from
the sky as an interesting theoretical exercise, rather than in
response to the emergence of a revisionist current completely
counterposed to Germain's thrust. Insisting that a new
worldwide revolutionary upsurge would not stabilize Stalin-
ism but rather was a mortal danger to it, he wrote:

"It is because the new revolutionary wave contains in
• embryo the destruction of the Stalinist parties as such
that we ought to be much closer today to the Communist
workers. This is only one phase of our fundamental task:
to construct new revolutionary parties . . . ." [our
emphasis]

"To be 'closer to the Stalinist workers' then signifies at
the same time to affirm more than ever our own program
and our own Trotskyist policy."

The "Ten Theses" showed that all wings of the Trotskyist
movement were still incapable of grasping the nature of the
social transformations which had occurred in Eastern Europe
(although the analysis of the British Haston-Grant RCP
majority, borrowed by the SWP's Los Angeles Vern-Ryan
grouping, achieved the beginning (but only the beginning) of
wisdom in recognizing that in the immediate post-war period
an examination of native property forms would hardly
suffice since the state power in Eastern Europe was a foreign
occupying army, the Red Army). In 1951 Germain still
considered the process of "structural assimilation" uncom-
pleted (!) and predicted the assimilation of the armies of the
East European states into the Soviet army-i.e., that Eastern
Europe would simply be incorporated into the Soviet Union.

FALL 1972

9

Germain did recognize that the transformation in Eastern
Europe destroyed capitaHsm but contained within it, even in
victory, a decisive bureaucratic obstacle to socialist develop-
ment; he stressed that the expansion of the USSR's non-
capitalist mode of production "is infinitely less important
than the destruction of the living workers' movement which
has preceded it."

No such inbuilt obstacle was recognized with regard to
China and, especially, Yugoslavia. The Trotskyists were
unable to disassociate the phenomenon of Stalinism from the
person of Stahn; the Titoists' break from the Kremlin
obscured any recognition that Yugoslavia would necessarily
pursue qualitatively identical domestic and diplomatic poli-
cies in safeguarding the interest of its own national bureau-
cratic regime against the working class. Uneasy about
admitting that Stalinist forces heading peasant masses could
ever consummate an anti-capitalist revolution, Germain in
"Ten Theses" termed both the Yugoslav and Chinese events
proletarian revolutions and also argued that "under such
conditions, these parties cease being Stalinist parties in the
classical sense of the term."

Whereas Pablo took these events as the new revolutionary
model which invalidated " 'pure' forms and norms" (i.e., the
Russian Revolution) Germain— again without referring to
Pablo— stressed that they were as a result of exceptional
circumstances which in any case would not be relevant to
advanced industrial countries. He contrasted "the de facto
United Front which today exists between the colonial
revolutions in Asia and the Soviet bureaucracy, which has its
objective origin in their being both menaced by imperial-
ism . . ." with the possibilities for Europe. He concurred
in the prediction of an imminent World War lil between "the
united imperialist front on the one hand and the USSR, the
buffer countries and the colonial revolutions on the other"
but rather than hailing it, termed it a counter-revolutionary
war.

The crux of Germain's argument was:

"What matters above all in the present period is to give
the proletariat an international leadership capable of
coordinating its forces and proceeding to the world
victory of communism. The StaUnist bureaucracy, forced
to turn with a blind fury against the first victorious
proletarian revolution outside the USSR [Yugoslavia!] , is
socially incapable of accomplishing any such task. Herein
lies the historical mission of our movement .... The
historical justification for our movement . . . resides in the
incapacity of Stalinism to overturn world capitalism, an
incapacity rooted in the social nature of the Soviet
bureaucracy."

With the advantage of hindsight and the experience of the
past 20 years-the counter-revolutionary nature of StaUnism
reaffirmed most clearly in Hungary in 1956; the 1960 Cuban
revolution in which petty-bourgeois nationalism at the head
of peasant guerillas uprooted capitalism only to merge with
the Stalinist apparatus internally and internationally; the
consistently nationalist and Stalinist policies of the Chinese
CP in power-it is easy to recognize that "Ten Theses" is
flawed in its analysis and predictions. What is much more
important, however, is the document's consistent and
deliberate non-factional tone which presaged Germain's
refusal to place himself in the anti-Pabloist camp. Divorced
from the determination to fight for a correct line in the

Fourth International, Germain's theoretical defense of the
necessity of Trotskyism meant very little. This was Pabloism
merely at one remove, the denial of the subjective factor in
the revolutionary process.

Third World Congress

The Third World Congress of the Fourth International was
held in August-September 1951. The main political report
attempted to distinguish between the Communist Parties and
"reformist parties" on the grounds that only the former were
contradictory, and projected that under the pressure of a
strong mass upsurge the CPs could become revolutionary
parties. The opportunist nature of Pablo's version of an
entrism tactic was sharply revealed in the repudiation of the
principled entrist goal of sharp polarization and split: "The
possibilities of important splits in the CPs ... are replaced by
a leftward movement within the CPs among its rank and
file." There was no recognition of decisive deformations in
the East European and Chinese workers states; thus implicit-
ly the Congress posed only a quantitative difference between
the Soviet Union of Lenin and the degenerated and deformed
workers states. The report projected the possibility that Tito
might "head a regroupment of revolutionary forces inde-
pendent of capitalism and of the Kremlin . . . playing a major
role in the formation of a new revolutionary leadership."
There was no mention of the perspective of permanent
revolution for the colonial countries.

The application of Pablo's poHcy of "entrism sui generis"
was elaborated in the Austrian Commission:

"The activity of our members in the SP will be governed
by the following directives: A. Not to come forward as
Trotskyists with our full program. B. Not to push forward
programmatic and principled questions . . .

No quantity of verbal orthodoxy in resolutions could have
any longer obscured the vision of those who wanted to see.

The Parti Communiste Internationaliste of France submit-
ted Germain's "Ten Theses" for a vote (after Germain
himself had apparently l)acked out of doing so) and proposed
amendments to the main document. No vote was taken on
the "Ten Theses" or the French amendments. The PCI voted
against adopting the thrust of the main document; it was the
only section to do so.

In the months that followed, the Pabloist line was
elaborated along the lines already made clear before and at
the Third World Congress:

"We are entering (the Stahnist parties] in order to remain
there for a long time banking on the great possibility of
seeing these parties, placed under new conditions ["a
generally irreversible pre-revolutionary period"], develop
centrist tendencies which will lead a whole stage of the
radicaUzation of the masses and of the objective revolu-
tionary processes . . . ."

(Pablo, Report to the 1 0th Plenum of the
International Executive Committee, February
1952)

"Caught between the imperialist threat and the colonial
revolution, the Soviet bureaucracy found itself obliged to
ally with the second against the first .... The disintegra-
tion of StaUnism within these parties ought not to be
understood ... as an organizational disintegration ... or a

(Continued next page)

10

SPARTACIST

. . . Pabloism

public break with the Kremlin but as a progressive internal

transformation."

("The Rise and Decline of Stalinism," Interna-
tional Secretariat, September 1953)

V. THE ANTI-PABLOISTS

implications of the Pabloist entrism. In a polemic against
minority theoretician Mestre the majority had written:

"If these ideas are correct, stop chattering about the tactic
of entrism, even entrism sui generis, and pose clearly our
new tasks: that of a more consistent tendency, not even a
left opposition . . . whose role is to aid Stalinism to
overcome its hesitation and to pose under the best
conditions the decisive clash with the bourgeoisie .... If
Stahnism has changed ... {it means that] it no longer
reflects the particular interests of a bureaucratic caste
whose very existence depends on the unstable equilibrium
between classes, that it is no longer bonapartist, but that
it reflects solely ... the defense of the workers state. That
such a transformation should be produced without the
intervention of the Soviet proletariat . . . but on the
contrary by an evolution of the bureaucracy it-
self . . . would lead us not merely to revise the Transition-
al Program [but] all the works of Leon Trotsky since
1923 and the foundation of the Fourth International."

("First Reflections of Zig Zag," PCI Internal

Bulletin No. 2, February 1952)

But the PCI majority, not unlike the SWF, demonstrated a
failure of concrete internationalism when faced with the
prospect of all alone carrying through the fight against
Pabloism.

On 3 June 1952 the PCI majority asked for recognition of
two French sections of the Fourth International, thus
permitting the PCI majority to carry out its own policies in
France. This was in clear violation of the founding statutes of
the Fourth International and meant the liquidation of the
International as a disciplined world body. What was required
as an international faction fight over the political line of the
Fourth International. But the PCI majority was unwilling to
subordinate work in France to the crucial fight for the
legitimacy and continuity of the Fourth International.
Pablo's refusal to accede to this demand led directly to the
split of the PCI m'ajority.

SWP Enters the Struggle

The SWP only joined the fight against revisionism when a
pro-Pabloist tendency, the Clarke wing of the Cochran-Clarke
faction, manifested itself within the American party. In his
reply to Renard dated 29 May 1952 Cannon had said:

"We do not see ["any kind of pro-Stalinist tendency"] in
the International leadership of the Fourth International
nor any sign nor symptom of it. We do not see any
revisionism [in the documents] ... we consider these
documents to be completely Trotskyist .... It is the
unanimous opinion of the leading people in the SWP that
the authors of these documents have rendered a great
service to the movement."

The story that the SWP had prepared some amendments to
the Third World Congress documents which Clarke (SWP
representative to the International) had burned instead, of
presenting is quite possibly true but not very significant, in
view of Cannon's declaration of political allegiance to Pablo
when it counted, in refusing to solidarize with the anti-
Pabloist PCI majority.

Against Cochran-Clarke's advocacy of an orientation
toward the CP fellow-travellers, the SWP majority affirmed
support to the Pabloist CP entrism tactic in general but
insisted on a kind of American exceptionalism, contrasting
the mass European parties with the pathetic American CP
milieu, lacking a working-class base and peopled with shoddy

With the capitulation of Germain, whose role in the
preliminary conflicts over Pabloist policies is ambiguous but
in whom the French appear to have placed some degree of
confidence, the task of fighting Pabloism fell to the French
PCI majority of Bleibtreu-Lambert and the American SWP.
Despite a considerable body of mythology to the contrary,
both the PCI and SWP vacillated when revisionism manifest-
ed itself at the head of the Fourth International, balking only
at applying it to their own sections. Both groups compromis-
ed themselves by uneasy acquiescence (combined in the case
of the PCI with sporadic resistance) to Pablo's policies
until the suicidal organizational consequences to their
sections necessitated sharp fights. Both abdicated the re-
sponsibility to take the fight against revisionism into every
body and every section of the Fourth International and both
retreated from the struggle by the foundation of the
"Internafional Committee" on the basis of "the principles of
orthodox Trotskyism." The IC from its inception was only a
paper international tendency consisting of those groups
which had already had splits between pro-Pabloist and
orthodox wings.

PCI Fights Pablo

The PCI majority, having had been placed in receivership
by the International Secretariat (which had installed the
Pablo-loyal minority led by Mestre and Frank as the
leadership of the French section), continued to claim
agreement with the line of the Third World Congress, arguing
that Pablo and the IS and lEC were violating its decisions!
According to the French, Pabloism "utilizes the confusions
and contradictions of the World Congress-where it could not
impose itself-in order to assert itself after the World
Congress." (undated "Declaration of the Bleibtreu-Lambert
Tendency on the Agreements Concluded at the lEC," March
or April 1952)

An important letter dated 16 February 1952 from Renard
on behalf of the PCI majority to Cannon appealed to the
SWP. Renard's letter claimed agreement with the Third
World Congress, including its French Commission, and
contrasted the supposedly non-Pabloist World Congress
(citing vague platitudes to demonstrate its presumably
orthodox thrust) with Pablo's subsequent actions and line in
the lEC and IS. Renard asserted that "Pabloism did not win
out at the Third World Congress." (He wisely did not
attempt to explain why his organization voted against the
main Congress documents!) The main argument of the letter
is an appeal against the Pabloist international leadership's
intervention into the French national section.

Cannon's reply of 29 May accused the PCI majority of
Stalinophobic opportunism in the union movement (a bloc
with progressive anti-communists agains the CP) and denied
the existence of any such thing as Pabloism.

The PCI majority evidenced a clear understanding of the

FALL 1972

11

third-rate intellectuals.

In response to the Cochran-Clarke threat, Cannon set
about forming • a faction in the SWP aided by the Weiss
leadership in Los Angeles. Cannon sought to line up the old
party cadre around the question of conciliation to Stalinism
and appealed to the party trade unionists like Dunne and
Swabeck by drawing an analogy between the need for
factional struggle within the party and the struggle within
the class against the reformists and sellouts as parallel
processes of factional struggle against alien ideology. He told
the May 1953 SWP Plenum:

"During the course of the past year, I had serious doubts
of the ability of the SWP to survive .... I thought that
our 25 year effort . . . had ended in catastrophic failure,
and that, once again, a small handful would have to pick
up the pieces and start all over again to build the new
cadre of another party on the old foundations."

(Closing speech, 30 May)

But Cannon chose another road. Instead of pursuing the
necessary struggle wherever it might lead, Cannon made a
bloc with the Dobbs-Kerry-Hansen apparatus over the organi-
zationally liquidationist implications of the Cochran-Clarke
line. In return for their support Cannon promised the
routinist, conservative Dobbs administration total control of
the SWP with no further interference from him ("a new
regime in the party").

The SWP's response to finding the dispute in the
International reflecting itself inside the American section was
to deepen its isolationism into virulent anti-internationalism.
Cannon's speech to the SWP majority caucus on 18 May
1953 stated, "We don't consider ourselves an American
branch office of an international business firm that receives
orders from the boss" and extolled discussion in which "we
work d\it, if possible [!], a common line." Cannon denied
the legitimacy of an international leadership and referred to
"a few people in Paris." He contrasted the Fourth Interna-
tional with Lenin's Comintern, which had state power and a
leadership whose authority was widely recognized, and thus
denied that the contemporary Fourth International could be
a democratic centralist body.

Cannon belatedly took exception to Pablo's conduct
against* the French majority, but only over the organizational
question in keeping with the proposition that the Interna-
tional ■ leadership should not intervene in the affairs of
national sections. He wrote:

". . . we were flabbergasted at the tactics used in the
recent French conflict and spUt, and at the inconceivable
organizational precedent established there. That is why I
delayed my answer to Renard so long. I wanted to help
the IS pohtically, but I didn't see how I could sanction
the organizational steps taken against the majority of an
elected leadership. I finally resolved the problem by just
ignoring that part of Renard's letter."

("Letter to Tom," 4 June 1953)

The "Letter to Tom" also reiterated the position that the
Third World Congress was not revisionist.

The crucial defects in the anti-Pabloist struggle of the PCI
and SWP were duly utilized by the Pabloists. The 14th lEC
Plenum took Cannon to task for his concept of the

International as a "federative union." It noted that the SWP
had never opposed the Pabloist entrism policy in principle
and accused the SWP-PCI of an unprincipled bloc on China.
Seizing on the SWP's one-sided orthodoxy (Hansen's defense
of an SWP majorityite's formulation that Stalinism is
"counterrevolutionary through and through "-a characteriza-
tion which fits only the CIA!) the Pabloists were able to
cloak their liquidation of an independent Trotskyist program
with pious reaffirmations of the contradictions of Stalinism
as a counterrevolutionary caste resting atop the property
forms established by the October Revolution.

IC Formed

Following the Cochran-Clarke split, the SWP precipitously
broke publicly with Pablo. On 16 November 1953 The
Militant carried "A Letter to Trotskyists Throughout the
World" which denounced Cochran-Clarke and Pablo and
belatedly solidarized with the "unjustly expelled" PCI
majority. The SWP's previous characterizations of the Third
World Congress as "completely Trotskyist" necessitated an
attempt in this so-called "Open Letter" to locate the
emergency of Pabloism after the Congress, which doomed
the SWP to present a somewhat unconvincing case leaning
heavily on a leaflet or two of the Pabloist French minority
from 1952. At about the same time the SWP produced
"Against Pabloite Revisionism" dated November 1953,
which contained a more competent analysis of Pablo's
Uquidationist accommodation to Stalinism:

"The conception that a mass Communist Party will talce
the road to power if only sufficient mass pressure is
brought to bear is false. It shifts the responsibihty for
revolutionary setbacks from the leadership to the
mass . . . ."

"The working class is transformed [by Pablo's theories]
into a pressure group, and the Trotskyists into a pressure
grouping along with it which pushes a section of the
bureaucracy toward the revolution. In this way, the
bureaucracy is transformed from a block and a betrayer of
the revolution ii;ito an auxiliary motor force of it."

In 1954 the "International Committee" was formed. It
included the French PCI majority, the American SWP
(fraternal) and the Healy (Burns) grouping in England. The
latter did not play any significant or independent role in the
fight against revisionism. The Healy-Lawrence split from the
disintegrating Revolutionary Communist Party after the war,
impelled by the Healy-Lawrence faction's deep entrist
perspective toward the British Labour Party, had been
backed by Pablo's International Secretariat, which recogniz-
ed two sections in Britain and gave them equal representafion
on the lEC. Healy was Cannon's "man" in England and had
been consistently supported by the SWP in disputes within
the RCP. When the SWP broke fiom Pablo, the Healy-
Lawrence faction spht, Healy aligning with the SWP and
Lawrence with Pablo (Lawrence later went over to Stalinism
as did the PCI minority's Mestre). Despite being part of the
new anti-Pabloist international bloc, the Healy group con-
tinued its arch-Pabloist Labour Party opportunism. It had no

(Continued next page)

12

SPARTACIST

. . . Pabloism

weight in the IC bloc until its recruitment of an impressive
layer of CP intellectuals and trade unionists (most of whom
it later lost) following the 1956 Hungarian Revolution made
it considerably more substantial in the British left.

The IC also claimed the adherence of the Chinese (emigre)
section, which had already undergone a split, and the small
Swiss section.

The IC managed to produce a couple of internal bulletins
in early 1954 but never met as a real international body, nor
was a centralized leadership ever elected. The tactic adopted
by the SWP was to boycott the Fourth World Congress, as
merely a meeting of Pablo's faction having no legitimacy as
the Fourth International.

The world movement paid a high price for this evasion. To
cite only one example: Ceylon. The Ceylonese LSSP took a
non-factional position on Pabloism, appealing to the SWP not
to split and to attend the Fourth Congress. A hard fight
should have been aggressively pushed toward the passive
Ceylonese doubtists, forcing a polarization and forging a hard
cadre in the struggle. Instead the Ceylonese drifted along
with Pablo. Some seven years later, the revolutionary
reputation of Trotskyism was besmirched in the eyes of
militants throughout the world by the LSSP's entry into the
bourgeois Ceylonese coalition government, precipitating a
last-minute split by the international Pabloist leadership. Had
a hard principled anti-revisionist fight been waged in the
Ceylon section in 1953, a hard revolutionary organization
with an independent claim to Trotskyist continuity might
have been created then, preventing the association of the
name of Trotskyism with the fundamental betrayal of the
LSSP.

Thus the anti-revisionist fight was deliberately not carried
to the world movement, the IC consisting mainly of those
groups which had already had their splits over the application
of Pabloist policies in their own countries, and the struggle to
defeat revisionism and reconstruct the Fourth International
on the basis of authentic Trotskyism was aborted.

From Flirtation to Consummation

In 1957 Pablo's International Secretariat and the SWP
flirted with possible reunification (the Hansen-Kolpe corres-
pondence). The basis at that time was formal orthodoxy-the
similarity of line between the IS and SWP in response to the
1956 Hungarian revolution. The SWP, perhaps naively ex-
pecting a repetition of Clarke's 1953 position on the possi-
bility of self-liquidation of the Stalinist bureaucracies, tend-
ed to accept the IS's formally Trotskyist conclusions over
Hungary as good coin. These early reunification overtures
came to naught because of the opposition of the British and
French IC groups, as well as Cannon's suspicions that Pablo
was maneuvering. The issue was posed in a defective way-
simply apparent empirical agreement without an examination
of past differences and present motion.

When the question, of reunification, consummated in
1963 with the formation of the United Secretariat, came up
again, the entire political terrain had shifted. The IS and the

SWP found themselves in agreement over Cuba. But the basis
was no longer an apparent convergence on orthodoxy, but
the SWP's abandonment of Trotskyism to embrace Pabloist
revisionism (which the SWP in its class-collaborationist line on
the Vietnamese war has now transcended on the path to out-
right reformism).

The basis for the 1963 reunification was a document titled
"For Early Reunification of the World Trotskyist Move-
ment-Statement by the Political Committee of the SWP," 1
March 1963. The key new hne was section 13:

"Along the road of a revolution beginning with simple
democratic demands and ending in the rupture of capital-
ist property relations, guerilla warfare conducted by land-
less peasant and semi-proletarian forces, under a leadership
that becomes committed to carrying the revolution
through to a conclusion, can play a decisive role in under-
mining and precipitating the downfall of a colonial and
semi-colonial power. This is one of the main lessons to be
drawn from experience since the Second World War. It
must be consciously incorporated into the strategy of
building revolutionary Marxist parties in colonial coun-
tries."

In "Toward Rebirth of the Fourth International," 12
June 1963, the Spartacist tendency counterposed:

"Experience since the Second World War has demonstrat-
ed that peasant-based guerilla warfare under petit-bour-
geois leadership can in itself lead to nothing more than an
anti-working-class bureaucratic regime. The creation of
such regimes has come about under the conditions of de-
cay of imperialism, the demoralization and disorientation
caused by Stalinist betrayals, and the absence of revolu-
tionary Marxist leadership of the working class. Colonial
revolution can have an unequivocally progressive revolu-
tionary significance only under such leadership of the rev-
olutionary proletariat. For Trotskyists to incorporate into
their strategy revisionism on the proietarian leadership in
the revolution is a profound negation of Marxism-
Leninism no matter what pious wish may be concurrently
expressed for 'building revolutionary Marxist parties in
colonial countries.' Marxists must resolutely oppose any
adventurist acceptance of the peasant-guerilla road to so-
cialism-historically akin to the Social Revolutionary pro-
gram on tactics that Lenin fought. This alternative would
be a suicidal course for the socialist goals of the move-
ment, and perhaps physically for the adventurers."

Ironically, the SWP's further rightist evolution leads it to
now repudiate the basic line of section 13, from the other
side-the U.Sec.'s advocacy of petty-bourgeois armed struggle
is far too adventurous for the legalistic SWP which aims to
become the mass party of American reformism.

Spartacist and the Fourth International

In his struggle to found the Fourth International, Trotsky
repeatedly underscored the imperative need for revolutionary
organization on an international basis. Prolonged national
isolation within one country must ultimately disorient,
deform and destroy any revolutionary grouping no matter
how subjectively steadfast. Only a principled and disciplined
international collaboration can provide a counterbalance to
the fierce pressures toward insularity and social chauvinism

FALL 1972

13

generated by the bourgeoisie and its ideological agents within
the working-class movement. As Trotsky recognized, those
who deny the need for a programmatically founded demo-
cratic centralist world party deny the Leninist concept of the
vanguard party itself. The destruction of the Fourth Interna-
tional by Pabloist revisionism, paralleled by organizational
fracturing into numerous competing international blocs,
necessitates unremitting struggle for its rebirth.

In our ten year history, the Spartacist tendency has faced
and resisted powerful objective pressures toyvard
abandonment pf an internationalist perspective. Cut off from
the possibility of disciplined international ties as a result of
the organizational sectarianism and subsequent political
degeneration of Gerry Healy's International Committee, the
Spartacist League has refused to passively acquiesce to the
national isolation forced upon us. We have emphatically
rejected the ersatz "internationalism" which achieves its
international connections at the price of a federalist non-
aggression pact thus renouncing in advance the struggle for
disciplined international organization. We have sought to
develop fraternal ties with groupings in other countries as
part of a process of clarification and polarization. Our aim is
the crystallization of a cohesive democratic centralist interna-
tional tendency based on principled programmatic unity, the

. . . SWP

(Continued from page 4)

there is led by the Leninist party. While the party press gives
lip service to [criticizing] the criminal attitude of the Chinese
and Soviet workers' states toward the Vietnamese Revolu-
tion, we maintain that Stalinism is still the major obstacle in
the workers movement to the international socialist revolu-
tion and must be thoroughly exposed and fought against at
every step.

In trying to defend the Revolution against imperialism,
the party blocs with one wing of U.S. imperialism in NPAC.
The betrayals of such a course are precisely the betrayals
that arose in the classical Popular Front. While the party
should attend antiwar conferences and marches, it should
fight to unite the working class around the banner of Lenin-
ism. It should have a position of revolutionary defeatism by
making a clear, unambiguous call for the military victory of
the DRVN, and NLF. It should take no organizational re-
sponsibiHty for NPAC and should oppose the idealistic single-
issuism and class collaboration that characterize it.

7. An integral part of the party's flight from a revolution-
ary working class program has been its flight from the work-
ing class itself. The party's line dictates a primary and almost
exclusive orientation to the petty bourgeoisie, which is re-
flected in the party's overwhelmingly petty bourgeois com-
position. These two interacting factors, program and com-
position, lead the party directly away from revolutionary
Marxism. We continue to call for a proletarian orientation, as
outlined in For a Proletarian Orientation. However, we be-
lieve that the most important thing is not simply orienting to
and becoming rooted in the working class, but doing that
with the correct program. The party's energies must be pri-

embryo of a, reborn Fourth International.

The current cracking of the several international
"Trotskyist" blocs now provides heightened opportunity for
the Spartacist tendency to intervene in the world move-
ment. Our history and program can serve as a guide for cur-
rents now in motion lowards authentic Trotskyism, because
despite involuntary national isolation for a time, we upheld
our internationalist determination and continued to wage a
principled fight against revisionism.

The shattering of the revisionists' and centrists' preten-
sions to international organization-the revelation that the
United Secretariat, the International Committee, etc. have
been nothing more than federated rotten blocs-combined
with the worldwide renewal of proletarian combativeness in a
context of sharpened inter-imperialist rivalry and intensified
deep-seated capitalist crisis, provide an unprecedented objec-
tive opportunity for the crystallization and development of
the Spartacist tendency internationally. As the poHtical
corpses of the revisionist blocs continue to decay, the Fourth
International, world party of socialist revolution, must be
reborn.

FOR THE REBIRTH OF
THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL!

marily oriented to the working class and to building a Lenin-
ist party thoroughly proletarian in composition.

8. The current program of the SWP is sharply counterpos-
ed to the revolutionary heritage of the party and to the
teachings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We announce
the formation of the Leninist Faction of the SWP which
shall fight to win the majority of the party to its program.

The Leninist Faction
15 May 1972

Marxist Bulletin No. 10

DOCUMENTS ON THE DEVELOPMENT
OF THE COMMUNIST WORKING
COLLECTIVE OF LOS ANGELES

Ol der from: SPARTACIST, Box 1377, G.P.O. ,
New York, N.Y, 10001

14

SPARTACIST

Suppressed Documents
Expose United Secretariat

The Case of
Bala Tampoe

We are bringing to the attention of the international
working-class movement the "case" of Bala Tampoe, head of
the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (Revolutionary), Ceylon sec-
tion of the "United Secretariat of the Fourth International."
The Tampoe scandal is much more than the revelation of
clear-cut anti-revolutionary conduct on the part of an in-
dividual U.Sec. leader. It is a record of dehberate, deep and
long-standing complicity on the part of the U.Sec, which had
continued to pass off as a "revolutionary" an individual
compromised by the most shameless violations of elemen-
tary communist morahty. The conduct of the wretched
Tampoe is in and of itself a scandal of enormous dimensions.
But the Tampoe "case" is crucial in that it unam'biguously
reveals on the part of the U.Sec. the most profound
political corruption.

The "case" of Bala Tampoe was raised at the U. See's
"World Congress" in April 1969, at the insistence of Edmund
Samarakkody, a member of the International Executive Com-
mittee whose group had split from Tampoe's LSSP(R) the
previous year. As detailed in the letter from Samarakkody
reprinted below, a Commission on Ceylon was estabhshed,
which met with Samarakkody and Tampoe. Two reports
were submitted from the Commission, a report of the Com-
mission itself and a separate report from its Indian member,
a senior leader of the Indian U.Sec. group who served as
chairman of the Commission.

The Commission on Ceylon was faced with the question
of what to do about Tampoe in t'he face of uncontested
facts: Tampoe's acceptance of a trip to the United States in
1967 financed by the Asia Foundation, a well-known recip-
ient of CIA funds, during which Tampoe had a private inter-
view in Washington with McNamara, then U.S. Secretary of

Defense; Tampoe's attendance at small social gatherings of
imperialist diplomats, including a private reception for ex-
Nazi Kiesinger of West Germany; Tampoe's conduct as the
bureaucratic head of the Ceylon Mercantile Union, a large
union of rather conservative white-collar workers; the poli-
cies of the LSSP(R) particularly in situations relating to
union policy. With reference to the latter, the Commission
report made a sweeping denunciation of the LSSP(R), couch-
ed in mild language: ". . .in none of these instances is there
any evidence that the party took what the Commission con-
sidered a pohcy consistent with revolutionary Marxism," or
as the Indian delegate's report put it, "the role of the
LSSP(R) during some of the recent strikes in Ceylon . . .
has been such as to place the party in the camp of the enemy
as opposed to workers in action."

Any one of these incidents would have been sufficient to
compel a revolutionary working-class organization to im-
mediately and pubhcly expel Tampoe as a traitor and an
enemy. But of course the U.Sec. is not a revolutionary
working-class organization. Having been compelled to con-
stitute a Commission on Ceylon, the U.Sec. then suppress-
ed the entire matter: in the minutes of the "World Con-
gress" there appeared not a single reference to the scandal-
ous facts which were the basis for the investigation! Re-
printed below from the "World Congress" minutes are all
the sections which deal with the Commission on Ceylon;
they give no hint of the nature of the uncontested accusa-
tions against Tampoe.

What about the one operative recommendation of the
Commissi6n-that Tampoe's dual role as head of the
X^SP(R) and of the Ceylon Mercantile Union be terminated
"as soon as possible"? The full reports of the Commission
and the Indian delegate demonstrate that were Tampoe
forced to choose between control of the 30,000-member
CMU and the 50-member "party"-whose policies show that
it is self-evidently nothing other than an appendage of Tam-
poe's CMU bureaucracy— there can be httle doubt he would
choose the CMU. And three years later, the 3 July 1972 is-
sue of the SWP's Intercontinental Press, in reprinting a
resolution of the General Council of the CMU, referred to
"Bala Tampoe, general secretary of the union and secretary
of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (Revolutionary), the Cey-
lonese section of the Fourth International."

So much for the Commission. In fact, the outcome of the
Tampoe "case" was never in doubt, recommendations for
further investigations to the contrary. For the "World Con-
gress" made its position unambiguously clear when it unani-
mously elected Tampoe to the incoming lEC. Thus the
U.Sec, whose adherents pride themselves on their calls for
"Victory to the NLF," included on its leading pohtical body
a man who admittedly has private discussions with U5. im-
periaUsm's War Minister!

Some Background

, The Trotskyist movement in Ceylon developed essentially
after Trotsky's death, but achieved effective hegemony in the
urban working class. The Lanka Sama Samaja Party, founded
in 1935, remained insulated from the Trotskyism/Stalinism

FALL 1972

15

split in world Communism until the outbreak of World War
II, when the urgent question of the Comintern's line toward
the war propelled a split in the LSSP. The forces who identi-
fied with Trotskyism gained the majority and shortly there-
after expelled the Stalinists. During the war the LSSP was il-
legalized and most of its leadership arrested. In the general
strikes that broke out in the early post-war period, the LSSP
consolidated its substantial mass base amofig the Sinhalese
working class in the cities, but never attained any real root-
ing in the doubly oppressed Tamil plantation proletariat. In
the Parliament issuing out of the 1947 elections, the LSSP
was the main Opposition to the bourgeois United National
Party. The LSSP provided the leadership for the massive gen-
eral strike of 1952 against the UNP government.

In 1951 Bandaranaike had led a split from the UN? to
form the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (now led by his widow).
In its class roots and program the SLFP was no different
than the UNP from which it had issued. After the 1952 elec-
tions, where the UNP won a substantial majority, the SLFP
became the main Parliamentary Opposition. In the period
leading up to the 1956 elections, the SLFP made its move.
Consolidating an electoral bloc with a group which had
split from the LSSP in 1953, the SLFP launched a
formidable agitation campaign centered around a policy of

"Sinhala Only," aimed against the pro-English language poli-
cy of the UNP but mainly against the Tamil minority, whip-
ping up and capitaHzing on virulent anti-Tamil chauvinism.
The LSSP maintained its programmatic plank ' in favor of
both Sinhala and Tamil being official languages, but defined
the defeat of the UNP as the main task, making a no-contest
electoral agreement with the bourgeois SLFP bloc-a policy
which the LSSP had sought since 195 1 .

After the 1956 elections the SLFP bloc became the gov-
ernment. The LSSP led the Opposition in Parliament. It be-
gan by defining its atfitude as one of "responsive coopera-

tion" with the new bourgeois government, but was compelled
into a more oppositional stance. Widespread rioting which
broke out in 1958 was followed by the imposition of a state
of emergency lasting several months. Outbreaks of strikes
continued sporadically for several years, in which the LSSP
played a considerable role due to its leadership of key unions
including the Government Workers Trade Union Federation.

In the March 1960 elecfions, the LSSP initially stood for
election in its own name. When the SLFP government lost a
motion of confidence, forcing new elections, the LSSP enter-
ed into a no-contest and mutual support pact with the SLFP.
An SLFP government was installed under Mrs. Bandaranaike.
In the ensuing Parliament the LSSP defined itself as neither
part of the government nor of the Opposition.

In 1964 the LSSP entered the Bandaranaike government
composed of the SLFP-LSSP-CP and was suddenly and
speedily expelled by the United Secretariat. The LSSP(R),
the current "Ceylon section" of the UJSec, was formed at
that time.

The importance of Ceylon is the struggle to win over the
Ceylonese proletariat— and especially the Tamil plantation
workers— as a staging area for proletarian revolution on the
Indian subconfinent as a whole. The LSSP's adaptation to
the bourgeois SLFP, which culminated in the entry into the
Bandaranaike government in 1964, was a degeneration be-
gun years before and ignored by the Pabloists, the SWP and
the Healyites (see WV No. 3). The capitulation to the SLFP
was rooted at least in part in the LSSP's historic failure to
base itself among the Tamil rural proletariat, finding roots
almost exclusively in the relatively privileged unionized Sin-
halese workers, leading to accommodation when the SLFP's
appeal to anti-Tamil chauvinism among Sinhalese workers
threatened the LSSP's mass base.

After the "Ninth World Congress"

In the spring of 1971 a mass uprising of peasant and stu-
dent youth took place in Ceylon. The uprising was led by the
Janata Vimukthi Peramuna, or People's Liberation Front,
which had been organizing clandestinely since 1966. The
JVP forces had initially helped to install the SLFP-LSSP-CP
government. In 1971 , operating under youth-vanguardist and
peasant-vanguardist conceptions, the JVP launched an upris-
ing. They relied on their own forces, without having politi-
cally prepared and mobilized any section of the broad mass-
es, neither the working class nor the peasantry. The JVP had
no position on the burning question of the rights of the op-
pressed Tamil minority in Ceylon. The rebel youth demon-
strated tremendous combativity and courage but no section
of the masses rose in support of the youth, who were bru-
tally crushed. The Bandaranaike government's pretensions to
"socialist democracy" and "anti-imperialism" did not of
course interfere with its bloody repression of the youth up-
rising. In the undertaking the government received military
aid from Britain, the U.S., the Soviet Union, India, Pakistan,
Egypt and elsewhere, and economic aid and explicit political
solidarity from China. Thus all interested, counterposed

(Continued next page)

NOW AVAILABLE:

"Declaration des Principes de la Spartacist

League"

(in French)

"Grundsatzerklarung der Spartacist League'
(in German)

"Declaracion de los Principios de la
Spartacist League"
(in Spanish)

25 CENTS U.S.

BOX 1377, G.P.O. .
NEW YORK, N.Y. 10001
U.S. A.

16

SPARTACIST

. . . Tampoe

power blocs of imperialists, Stalinists and nationalists com-
peted in aiding the Ceylonese government in crushing the
domestic uprising. Thousands of youth were massacred and
thousands more arrested.

The line of the United Secretariat was, predictably, to
politically solidarize with the JVP without any criticism of its
Sinhalese chauvinism, its adventurist substitution of armed
struggle for political preparation of the working masses, its
denial of the uniquely leading role of the proletariat in social-
ist revolution. This uncritical Pabloist tailing of qualitatively
politically defective elements is classic centrism.

This was, however, not the policy of the U. See's own
section in Ceylon. Tampoe is nothing but a social chauvinist
and cynical reformist union bureaucrat. Tampoe's real role
caused no alarm in the U.Sec.-it had after all been clearly
demonstrated two years before at the 1969 "World Con-
gress." The U.Sec. simply manufactured a fairy tale about
the role of Tampoe and the LSSP(R) in the youth uprising.

The U.Sec. Hne was presented in a statement of the U.Sec.
printed in Intercontinental Press, 19 April 1971. The claim
is that the JVP and the LSSP(R) were participants in a "sin-
gle revolutionary front" leading the uprising. The same line
was repeated in an article in the British New Left Review,
ffom which several people have recently gone over to the
UJSec. (The article was later reprinted in PL magazine, of all
places. This puts PL in the unenviable position of politically
and physically attacking all "Trotskyites"— except one— the
one who took money from the Asia Foundation.)

The problem with the "single revolutionary front" is
really quite simple. It is a He from start ti finish. The JVP
was brutally suppressed, and thousands of its members and
suspected members were indiscriminately killed or arrested.
For weeks the bodies of young people killed by the armed
forces floated in the rivers of Ceylon. It is a fact that not one
member of the LSSP(R) was taken into police custody at that
time even accidentally- surely inexplicable favoritism on the
part of the bourgeois state toward an organization which the
U.Sec. claims was equally the vanguard ofithe uprising!

Tampoe and the Youth Uprising

In September 1971 one Lord Avebury of "Amnesty In-
ternational" was expelled from Ceylon after attempting to
enter a youth detention camp. A government communique
identified Bala Tampoe as one of the individuals who had ac-
companied Avebury. It further stated: "Lord Avebury was
in close contact with several persons who appeared to be anx-
ious to embarrass and discredit the government and to smear
the image of Ceylon, in this island and abroad." To disassoci-
ate himself from the terrible charge of wanting to discredit
the government— which had just brutally butchered thou-
sands of young insurgents-Tampoe rushed off an indignant
letter: "... the insinuation ... is not only false but obvious-
ly malicious. Never in my life have I said or done anything to
smear the image of Ceylon in this island or abroad."

A letter from Tampoe to the Prime Minister dated 30
April 1971 hardly befits a leader in a "single revolutionary
front" discussing the massive execution of the JVP. Unwill-
ing to take responsibihty for even the mildest protest, Tam-
poe hid behind LSSP Cabinet Minister LesHe Goonewardena:
"Mr. Leslie Goonewardena himself seems to beUeve that 'ex-
cesses' have been committed by the armed services since the
uprising began . . . ." Tampoe cannot even protest the un-
speakably brutal JVP suppression without putting the word
"excesses" in quotation marks!

In August 1971 a resolution of the General Council of
Tampoe's CMU resolved that "the General Council will mo-
bilize the entire membership of the union to make whatever
sacrifices that the mass organizations of the people may con-
sider necessary" if the bourgeois government will undertake
measures "to break Ceylon free of the stranglehold of Im-
perialism upon it, and thereby to enable the people to set
about tlie establishment of a genuine sociaHst democracy in
Ceylon." To call upon a capitalist regime— and one which has
just demonstrated its viciously reactionary nature in blood-
to build socialism, to urge the working class to make "sacri-
fices" in the interests of such a government, is this the line
of the United Secretariat? We confidently expect that at
least some elements in the U.Sec. will profess themselves very
shocked about Tampoe's conduct, pleading innocence of the
information. Yet the Intercontinental Press statement quot-
ed earlier as identifying Tampoe as head of the LSSP(R) and
the CMU is an introduction to a declaration of the very same
CMU General Council. The United Secretariat's selective
memory when it comes to Bala Tampoe is quite deliberate.
It is the application in practice of the Pabloist revisionism
that is built into the foundations of the United Secretariat.
Thus that "United Secretariat," its "fraternal" SWP included,
is led, purely and simply, to perpetuate a fraud and a crime
against the international working class.

Revolutionary Samasamaja Party
(Fourth Internationalist)
5C, Galle Road, Dehiwala
[Ceylon]

26 May 1972

Dear Comrade Gordon,

I received your letter of 12 May 1972.

Regarding your inquiry on the authenticity of the two
typewritten documents entitled "Report of the Commission
on Ceylon of the Ninth World Congress of the Fourth Inter-
national" and "[Indian delegate's] Report-Ceylon Ques-
tion" both of which I handed to Comrade Bill L. when he
was recently in Ceylon, I may inform you as follows:

I attended the Ninth World Congress of the Fourth Inter-
national (United Secretariat) held in Europe from 11 to 19
April 1969 as a member of the Internafional Executive "Com-
mittee elected at the Eighth Congress in 1965. At this Con-
gress (Ninth Congress) a Commission was appointed to
inquire into the circumstances leading to, and the politics of
the split in the LSSP(R) in 1968 and the request of the RSP

FALL 1972

17

that it be recognized as the Ceylon section of the Fourth In-
ternational. The Commission consisted of the following:
[two delegates from North America, one from Switzerland,
a senior delegate each from China and India, and a delegate
from Japan designated who, however, was not present] .

[The Indian delegate] left the Congress on the 17th. Be-
fore leaving [the Indian delegate] handed me a copy of his
report which he stated wais a minority report and which he
left with the Commission. I returned his report to [the In-
dian delegate] after taking a true copy of it. I informed [the
Indian delegate] that I had taken a copy of it.

On 19 April, two days after, the Ceylon question came up
for consideration before the Congress; The report of the
Commission was read out in open Congress by a member of
the Commission and translated simultaneously to other lan-
guages. Copies of the report were handed to Tampoe and me.
I raised with the Commission the question of the minority
report of [the Indian delegate] a copy of which I said was
with me. I displayed this copy of the [Indian delegate's] re-
port and requested the Commission to table this report. The
spokesman for the Commission thereupon admitted that [the
Indian delegate] had submitted a report but that it was not a
minority report. When my turn for intervention in the Cey-
lon question came I quoted extensively from the [Indian
delegate's] report without being challenged in regard to the
accuracy of it.

At the end of the dehberations on the Ceylon question
the Praesidium collected the copies of the report of the Com-
mission that were in the hands of the translators and also the
copies that had been handed over to me and Tampoe. I how-
ever had with me my copies of the Commission report and
[the Indian delegate's] report made by me from the originals
in that regard when these were handed over to me by [a
North American Commission member] and [the Indian dele-
gate]. respectively. I am in a position therefore to state that
the copies of these two reports that I handed over to Com-
rade L. are true copies of the Ceylon Commission report and
of the [Indian delegate's] report.

You are free to give publicity to these reports. I agree
with you that "the scandalous revelations will be a service to
the struggle to rebuild the Fourth International."

Yours fraternally,
[signed]

Edmund Samarakkody
Secretary

Revolutionary Samasamaja Party

REPORT OF THE COMMISSION
ON CEYLON

The Commission had to deal with the following matters:—
(a) A request by the RSP led by Comrade Edmund not to
allow Comrade Bala to sit in the Congress because as an
"agent of the class enemy" he would endanger the world
movement. This request was reiterated in the Commission
and in front of the Congress charging Bala explicitly with
being a "CIA agent."

(b) A written request of the RSP to disaffiliate the
LSSP(R) led by Comrade Bala, as the section of the 4th
International and to recognize the RSP as the Ceylon section
of the 4th International.

(c) A written request by Comrade Karalasingham for his
tendency that neither the LSSP(R) nor the RSP be recog-
nized as the Ceylon section of the 4th International by this
Congress.

Concerning the charges that Comrade Bala is an agent of
the enemy class, on the basis of documents submitted by
Comrade Edmund and Bala and after hearing extensively
from the two comrades the Commission [found] that the
accusation that Comrade Bala is "an agent of the class
enemy" or an "agent of the CIA" was totally unsubstanti-
ated by Comrade Edmund. To make such a grave charge was
totally irresponsible on the part of Comrade Edmund and
should be condemned by the World Congress.

All members of the Commission were able to agree on one
point; while the leadership of a large militant union by a
comrade of the 4th International might be an important
achievement, the close interrelationship between the Ceylon
Mercantile Union (CMU)-a union of 30,000 white collar
workers with its own political needs-and a small party of
some 50 members a large percentage of whom either belong
to the union 'or hold leadership positions in that union
inevitably results in a tendency to subordinate the party line
and actions of the party to the needs of the trade union
policy. Such a situation is dangerous even if the comrades
involved start with the best revolutionary intentions.

It was with this question that the Commission was
centrally concerned. The Commission did not feel it was in a
position to fully examine the policies of Comrade Bala in his
Union. We were concerned only with the possible subordina-
tion of party policies to the needs of the union, and the
serious problems posed by the dual position of Comrade Bala
as secretary of the LSSP(R):

The Commission felt that some of the actions and policies
of Comrade Bala and the LSSP(R) brought to our attention
by Comrade Edmund and not denied by Comrade Bala could
have seriously damaged the reputation of Comrade Bala as a
revolutionary leader, compromised the 4th International in
Ceylon and [could] have been exploited by all the enemies
of our movement. In this context, we refer especially to the
following examples :-

(a) A series of incidents which together constitute
compromisingly close relations between Comrade Bala and
the Ceylonese embassies or missions of the imperialist
countries;

(1) A trip to the U.S. in the summer of 1967, financed
by the Asia Foundation.

(2) His acceptance of a small private luncheon invitation
at the residence of the British High Commissioner, during the
1966 plantation workers strike-a luncheon that was also
attended by Thondaman, a trade union leader who was
playing, an open strikebreaking role against the plantation
workers.

(Continued next page)

18

SPARTACIST

. . . Tampoe

(3) His attendance at a small dinner party at the West
German Embassy for visiting Chancellor Kiesinger.

. (b) A letter sent to the Ceylonese Prime Minister on 22
January 1966 by Comrade Bala in his capacity as union
General Secretary, concerning the state of emergency in
which he implied support for the imposition of a curfew in
response to the "violence" that occurred in Colombo. (This
letter is included in bulletin 17 March 1969.)

(c) Comrade Bala's policy in regard to the struggle against
devaluation of the rupee in November-December 1967. The
CMU did not support the strike that took place at that time
in the private sector. Serious questions are raised concerning
why the LSSP(R) did not take the lead in fighting for united
action by all the trade unions and working-class parties
against devaluation.

Again on these charges and in other similar ones we did
not attempt to pass judgment on the policies of the CMU,
but on the subordination of the poUcies of the LSSP(R) to
the union, as in none of these instances is there any evidence
that the party took what the Commission considered a policy
consistent with revolutionary Marxism.

The Commission was not unanimous in evaluating all
these actions. While all agreed they were, or could be,
extremely compromising, some comrades felt they might be
explained in the context of Ceylonese political and trade
union life; others felt they were totally unjustifiable.

With regard to the appeal of the RSP, headed by Comrade
Edmund, to be recognized as the Ceylon section of the 4th
International, the Commission clearly established the follow-
ing facts: (1) that this group while in the LSSP(R) before the
spht operated as an undeclared faction within the party, (2)
that its claim of manipulation of the attendance of the April
1968 LSSP(R) conference is extremely dubious since at this
conference both tendencies received the same number of
votes as in the conference of June 1967, (3) that while
Comrade Edmund's tendency was not granted any minority
representation at this 1968 conference, either on the Central
Committee or on bodies such as the controlling body of the
party press, and that this refusal of representation is contrary
'to Trotskyist practice. Comrade Edmund's group split one
week after this conference, without consulting or even
informing the United Secretariat in advance. In previous
letters the United Secretariat had clearly stated it was
opposed to any splits in the LSSP(R), (4) that upon splitting
or forming the RSP, this group quickly issued a declaration
to the public not only simply announcing its break, but
attacking Comrade Bala, leader of the Ceylon section,
openly as an enemy of the working class and in a thinly
disguised way as an agent of the CIA. The Ceylon capitalist
press featured the full text of this statement gravely accusing
Comrade Bala whose union had just ended a large strike. (5)
Finally in its press and its letterhead the RSP has fraudulent-
ly proclaimed itself as the Ceylon section of the 4th
International.

On the basis of the undisputed facts the Commission had
this established, and after lengthy and serious consiideration,

the Commission unanimously recommends the following
conclusions to the World Congress:-

(1) It is the duty of the 4th International to defend
Comrade Bala against accusations of the "agent" type. The
World Congress should appeal to the RSP to withdraw these
slanderous and damaging accusations publicly and in an
appropriate manner.

(2) The split from the LSSP(R) in April 1968 was only
the last of a series of crises and breakaways that have beset
the LSSP(R) since its founding in the necessary break from
the LSSP. One of the reasons for these periodic crises is that
the leadership of the LSSP(R), or at least a part of it, could
not adapt itself to the new reality of a reduced size of the
party and tried to operate as they did during the days of the
mass LSSP. The United Secretariat was completely correct in
stating that there was no principled political basis for the
split of the Edmund group from the LSSP(R). The 4th
International hopes that eventually all Trotskyist forces in
Ceylon will be able to unite their efforts in one organization.
However at this time, the latest split and the wounds it has
caused being too recent to allow the two groups to function
seriously as one.

(3) The evidence placed before the Commission tends to
support the conclusion that the policies followed by Com-
rade Bala— especially in his dual role as CMU secretary and as
LSSP(R) secretary-were gravely compromising to the 4th
International. The Commission was not in a position to get a
clear enough picture of the policies of Comrade Bala in the
concrete circumstances of Ceylon and the LSSP(R) to
propose that this section be disaffiliated by the World
Congress. But we strongly feel the need for further investiga-
tion of this matter. We therefore recommend the estaWish-
ment of a small Commission composed of experienced
comrades, preferably including at least one comrade able to
speak the languages of Ceylon who could investigate the case
by going to that country. At the same time, of course, the FI
should not only investigate, but should try to help the
LSSP(R) concretely in its work.

Specifically we urge the World Congress the following:—

(1) That the leading bodies of the International be
instructed to appoint a small investigating committee along
the lines mentioned above. This committee will submit a
report of its findings and its recommendations for action to
the next meeting of the lEC.

(2) That the lEC act with all possible speed on the
recommendations of this committee with full powers of a
World Congress including the power to disaffiliate the
LSSP(R) as the Ceylon section of the 4th International if it
feels this is the proper action.

(3) That until the lEC decides otherwise, the LSSP(R)
remains the Ceylon section of the FI and thus should be
given all possible assistance in its work by all bodies of the
International.

(4) That the double function of Comrade Bala as the
secretary of both the CMU and the section be terminated as
rapidly as possible.

(5) The RSP would not be recognized as the Ceylon
section even were there not already a recognized section in
Ceylon. The. unacceptable methods by which this tendency
carried through its factional fight before and after the split
dictate a very reserved attitude on this question. We appeal

FALL 1972

19

to the RSP to prove its loyalty to the FI in renouncing at
once the pretension of being the recognized section, by
retracting the above mentioned attacks of a factional
[nature] upon the LSSP(R) and its leadership, and by this
means prepare the eventual regrouping of the Trotskyist
forces of Ceylon in a united section.

INDIAN DELEGATE'S REPORT

The Ceylon Commission invited both Comrade Bala
Tampoe as General Secretary of the LSSP(R), the official
section of the Fourth International in Ceylon, and Comrade
Edmund Samarakkody, leader of the RSP which has broken
with the section, to explain their respective positions in
' connection with the split of April 1968 following a special
Conference of the Party.

The Commission had before it a written representation
submitted by the Provisional Committee of the RSP entitled
"Events leading to the spht in LSSP(R) in April 1968"
demanding that the LSSP(R) be disaffiliated as a section of
the Fourth International on the grounds that the latter was
following bourgeois politics alien to Marxism-Leninism and
further suggests that the RSP be recognized as a section in its
place.

The RSP has also made some charges of a personal nature
against Comrade Bala as the leader of the LSSP(R). These
charges relate to a trip made by Comrade Bala to the U.S. of
America on an invitation and financed by the Asia Founda-
tion and also to the unusually friendly relations maintained
by him with the British and West German diplomatic missions
in Colombo.

Comrade Bala on the other hand made a separate
•representation in a statement on behalf of the CC of the
LSSP(R) challenging the right of Comrade Edmund, a former
member of the lEC, to be present at the World Congress as a
representative of a split away group. He had accused
Comrade Edmund of splitting the Party in defiance of a
specific directive given by the Fourth International leader-
ship for maintaining unity, and of now trying to cover it up
with various baseless charges.

The Commission sought clarification from both comrades
on the charges and counter-charges made by them against
each other. It is indeed regrettable that the split in the
LSSP(R) took place in the manner in which it did without
giving proper opportunity to the International leadership to
intervene and avert it if possible.

Comrade Edmund justified the split on the grounds that
the differences between his tendency and the majority of the
LSSP(R) had reached a stage where they could not be
resolved within a single organization. He also maintained that
he kept the United Secretariat informed of the develop-
ments. He claimed the support of 40 out of 110, members
who consfituted the LSSP(R) in 1964 after they broke away
-from the reformist LSSP led by N.M. Perera a$ a protest
against the class collaborationist coalition politics of the
leadership of the united LSSP.

The LSSP(R) which was recognized as an official section
of the Fourth International in 1964 had to contend with the

secession of a pro-coalition tendency led by Comrade Karlo
which has since entered the reformist LSSP. It had then to
face the disruptionist activities of the Healyites inside its
organizational fold. After the April 1968 split the Healyites
have left the Party to form their own separate group. It has
been contended thit some of the Healyites are still in the
LSSP(R) led by Comrade Bala.

The latest split has not only seriously undermined the
prestige of the Fourth International in Ceylon where the
Trotskyist movement had once a mass party in the LSSP
which has since degenerated. On the basis of some reports
before the Commission there is no guarantee that the
LSSP(R) as constituted at present after April 1968 will not
further split especially in the context of the Healy tendency
in the fold.

Therefore it is necessary for the World Congress to
re-examine the entire strategy of constructing a section of
the Fourth International in Ceylon by regrouping the best
elements of the Trotskyist movement.

It must be said that the Commission did not have any
evidence to substantiate the charge made by Comrade
Edmund that Comrade Bala is an agent of the CIA, because
he accepted a trip to the U.S.A. on a project sponsored by
the Asia Foundation. The Commission rejects the charge as
irresponsible and motivated by factional considerations.

But at the same time the Commission cannot but take a
dim view of the manner in which Comrade Bala got himself
invited to the U.S.A. ostensibly under a project sponsored by
the Harvard University. Although Comrade Bala maintains
that he had kept the United Secretariat and SWP informed
about his trip, some of his activities in Washington like his
interview with McNamara have not been fully explained.
Also the unusually friendly relations he maintains with the
diplomatic missions of West Germany (he was invited to a
dinner party by West German Chancellor Kiesinger) and U.K.
(he and his wife were invited to a luncheon by the British
High Commissioner in the midst of a strike of plantation
workers)— all these do not befit a militant trade unionist and
a revolutionary Marxist belonging to the Fourth Internation-
al. More important, however, is the fact that the political
positions adopted by the LSSP(R) leadership on a number of
questions during the last two or three years and the trade
union tactics pursued by Comrade Bala as leader of the CMU
also give scope for a great deal of misunderstanding. There is
enough documentary evidence to show that the LSSP(R) has
been pursuing a Une on issues like united fronts with other
working-class organizations which, to say the least, does not
conform to the general strategy of the Fourth International
movement. The role of the LSSP(R) during some of the
recent strikes in Ceylon like the Government Employees
strike and workers' strike action against devaluation measures
of the UNP government, and its consistent refusal to have
joint action with other working-class parties has been such as
to place the party in the camp of the enemy as opposed to
workers in action. It has been even alleged that during a
recent strike some of the CMU units on specific instructions
from the leadership resorted to strikebreaking activities-not

(Continued next page)

20

SPARTACIST

. . . Tampoe

a complimentary development for the Fourth International
movement.

Further the letter written by Comrade Bala to the Prime
Minister of the UNP government during the anti-devaluation
strike and the privileged treatment given to him to hold a
public meeting when meetings by others were banned in
Colombo— along with some other incidents— have made Com-
rade Bala a suspect in the eyes of the militant working-class
movement in Ceylon. Comrade Bala's contention that the
charges had been borrowed from the journals pubUshed by
the LSSP, CP(M) and pro-Peking group, etc., does not
minimize the gravity of the situation.

There is enough evidence to show that the CMU is
controlled bureaucratically by Comrade Bala. His wife is an
important paid functionary of the CMU. So are some of the
other colleagues of his in the LSSP(R). The fact that a
section controls a big union like the CMU with a membership
of 30,000 is indeed a positive gain. But it must be
remembered that the CMU consists mostly of white collar
employees known for their conservative political outlook
especially in Ceylon. And there is an unfortunate tendency
on the part of Comrade Bala to subordinate the pohtics of
the LSSP(R) to the needs of the CMU.

This perhaps explains to a large extent the opportunist
tactics pursued by the party on several trade union questions.
Whatever be the final decision of the World Congress on the
status of the LSSP(R) there is certainly a need for separating
the leadership of the LSSP(R) from that of the CMU. In
other words the top functionary of the CMU should not be
the chief executive of the Party especially when the CMU
represents the only mass [base] of the Party in Ceylon.

There are several charges against the leadership of the
LSSP(R) which could not be verified on the basis of the
documents placed before the Commission. But there is
enough grounds to feel that there is something rotten about
the functioning of the Ceylon section as it stands. It has been
alleged by a member of the LSSP(R), Comrade T.M. Perera
for example, that the leadership denied any representation to
the minority represented by Edmund on even the CC of the
LSSP(R). Even if some of the charges are exaggerated the
repercussions of unseemly controversy now raging in Ceylon
in other countries can be far reaching.

Under the circumstances, the Commission feels that it
would seriously undermine the prestige of the Fourth
International as an international party of the revolutionary
proletariat if the LSSP(R) as constituted today is continued
as an official section of the Fourth International. Its bona
fides are in doubt, even if there is no slur on the character of
the individual leaders of the Party. The Commission there-
fore recommends that the LSSP(R) should be disaffiliated as
i a section to create the proper political conditions and
facilitate the regrouping of genuine Trotskyist elements in
Ceylon as a new secfion of the Fourth International.

At the same time the Commission rejects the claim of the
RSP to be granted recognition as an official section of the
Fourth International as the behavior of its leadership in

precipitating a split has been far from being responsible. The
Commission deeply regrets to recommend such steps in a
country where the Trotskyist movement has had a long
tradition. It would have favored a course whereby the two
tendencies that have split from each other could be brought
together into a "single, party. Such a possibility does not exist
for the present.

The Commission suggests that the World Congress should
set up a special Commission with powers to visit Ceylon at an
early date and explore the possibility of a new section of the
Fourth International being built in that country.

"WORLD CONGRESS"
MINUTES

"MINUTES OF THE THIRD WORLD CONGRESS SINCE
REUNIFICATION (NINTH WORLD CONGRESS) OF THE
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, WORLD PARTY OF THE
SOCIALIST REVOLUTION."

[Extracts dealing with Ceylon]

I. ORGANIZATION OF THE CONGRESS.

Procedural motions from the outgoing United Secretariat:

d. That the following commissions be constituted with
the following members:

3. Ceylon Commission-Therese, Abel, Kailas, Pia,
Peng, Okatani (if he arrives).

Bala raises question as to the basis for constitution of
the Ceylon Commission.

Clarification by Livio for the outgoing United Secre-
tariat that the Ceylon Commission was constituted to review
an appeal and charges made by Comrade Edmund, a member
of the outgoing lEC.

Pia requests that he not be a member of the Ceylon
Commission.

Amendment by Pia: That Pia be removed from the
Ceylon Commission.

Amendment by Pia defeated.

Motion by Therese: To approve the composition of
all commissions as amended.

Motion carried.

XI. REPORT FROM THE CEYLON COMMISSION by Pia.
Motions from Ceylon Commission:

1. That the leading bodies of the International be in-
structed to appoint a small investigating committee along the
lines mentioned above. This committee will submit a report
of its findings and its recommendations for action to the
next meeting of the lEC.

2. That the lEC act with all possible speed on the recom-
mendations of this committee with the full powers of a

FALL 1972

21

World Congress, including the power to disaffiliate the
LSSP(R) as the Ceylon section of the Fourth International if
it feels this is the proper action.

3. That until the lEC decides otherwise, the LSSP(R)
remains the Ceylonese section of the Fourth International,
and thus should be given all possible assistance in its work
by all bodies of the International.

4. That the double function of Comrade Bala as secre-
tary of both theCMU and the section be terminated as rapid-
ly as possible.

5. The RSP would not be recognized as the Ceylon sec-
tion even were there not already a recognized section in
Ceylon. Th,e unacceptable methods by which this tendency
carried through its factional fight before and after the split
dictate a very reserved attitude on this question. We appeal
to the RSP to prove its proclaimed loyalty to the Fourth In-
ternational in renouncing at once the pretension of being the
recognized section, by retracting the above-mentioned unac-
ceptable attacks upon Comrade Bala, by renouncing further
attacks of a factional nature upon the LSSP(R) and its leader-
ship, and by this means prepare the eventual regrouping of
the Trotskyist forces of Ceylon in a united section.

Motion by Pia: That Bala and Edmund be given each
one-half hour to explain their positions.

Motion carried.

Discussion on Ceylon Commission report: Edmund,
Bala, Pierre.

Motion by Pierre: That the only question to be dis-
cussed now is the recognition of the Ceylon section.
Discussion.

Motion carried.

Continuation of discussion on Ceylon Commission re-
port: Walter, Abel.

Motion by Abel: That the International Executive
Committee investigate with the full power of the World Con-
gress the allegations made by the comrades from Ceylon and
that the incommg I EC have the power to disaffiliate the
Ceylon section pending the results of the investigation.

Continuation of discussion on Ceylon Commission re-
port: Lewis, Walter, Abel, Gulam, Pierre.

Summary of Ceylon Commission report by Pia.

Xin. VOTING ON RESOLUTIONS AND COMMISSION
REPORTS.

5. Motion by Abel:

a. That this World Congress rejects the request that the
LSSP(R) be disaffiliated and that the RSP of Comrade
Edmund be recognized as the Ceylon section.

b. The LSSP(R) is and remains the Ceylon section of the
Fourth International.

c. That in view of the charges leveled, we instruct the Inter-
national Control Commission to carry out a thorough in-
vestigation and to submit a report containing its findings and

its recommendations for action to the coming meeting of
the lEC.

Motion by Pierre:

a. The World Congress rejects the request by Comrade
Edmund for disaffiliafion of the LSSP(R).

b. The LSSP(R) is and remains the Ceylonese section of the
Fourth International.

c. The next session of the I EC will have on its agenda the
activity of the Ceylon section.

Points a. and b. of both motions carried unanimously.

Roll call vote on point c. of Abel's motion.

Full delegates: 14 for, 28 against, 8 abstentions.

Fraternal delegates: 8 for, 8 against, no absten-
tions.

Motion defeated.

Voice vote on point c. of Pierre's motion.
Motion carried unanimously.

XIV. ELECTION OF THE INTERNATIONAL EXECUTIVE
COMMITTEE.

Motion by Walter: That the following comrades make
up the I EC: ...Bala

Motion by Walter: To accept slate as amended by in-
clusion of [two additional nominees] as full members.

Motion carried unanimously. ■

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22

SPARTACIST

• . . Economism

(Continued from page 24)

economism is the failure of the working class, in the absence
of revolutionary leadership, to reject bourgeois ideology and
place its revolutionary class interests above particular, sec-
tional or apparent needs or desires. Concretely, economism
manifests itself in competition between groups of workers
undercuttmg or destroying the unity of the entire class,
support by the labor movement for its national bourgeoisie,
failure to fight racial and sexual oppression, indifference to
democratic rights and civil liberties, and a lack of concern for
the cultural heritage of mankind (bourgeois culture).

What economism is not is the workers' strong desire for a
higher standard of living. On the contrary, the basis of
economism is the material and cultural oppression of the
working class. It is material deprivation, or the fear of it,
which causes groups of workers to view their particular and
immediate interests as more important than any other
consideration. It is social and cultural oppression which
causes workers to accept pernicious bourgeois ideologies like
nationalism and religion. The struggle to raise the material
and cultural level of the workers is essential to the real
struggle against economism. The need for a revolutionary
transitional program is precisely to ensure that these gains do
not come at the expense of other sections of the oppressed
but transcend the framework of competition for "a slice of
the pie." Preachments of moral uplift in the labor movement
are not a serious fight against economism.
Social-Democratic Reformism and Trade Unionism

There is a strong tendency on the left to identify
economism with simple trade unionism and thus to see any
concern with the affairs of government as a step away from
economism. The Workers League, American affiliate of Gerry
Healy's "International Committee," presents any strike
propaganda containirig demands on the government, or
raising the slogan of a labor party regardless of its program,
as inherently anti-economist. Lenin is sufficiently explicit
that economism does not mean merely lack of concern for
"politics." The economism/poUtics dichotomy demonstrates
crude anti- Leninism. In What Is To Be Done? Lenin
repeatedly insists:

"Lending 'the economic struggle itself a political charac-
ter' means, therefore, striving to secure satisfaction of
trade [union] demands, the improvement of working
conditions in each separate trade ... by legislative and
administrative methods. This is precisely what all trade
unions do and have always done .... the phrase 'lending
the economic struggle itself a political character' means
nothing more than the struggle for economic reforms."

Trade unions are always and necessarily impeded by the
bourgeois state. Even the most backward trade union
bureaucrats are in favor of reducing legal restrictions on
themselves and achieving through government reforms what
caimot be attained over the bargaining table.

Social-democratic reformism and simple business union-
ism are two forms of economism that usually co-exist
peacefully within the labor movement. And when reformism
and business unionism do conflict, it is not always "pohtics"
(reformism) that represents the higher form of class struggle.
In the U.S. proto-social -democratic, "progressive" unionists
(Sidney Hillman, Walter Reuther) have often been less

militant in industrial conflicts than straight business unionists
(John L. Lewis, Jimmy Hoffa). This is because the "political-
ly concerned," "progressive" union bureaucrats are closely
associated with a wing of the Democratic Party, which
they don't want to embarrass by industrial disruption.
The "anti-economism" of these politically sensitive union
bureaucrats is a facade for sellouts and a cover for seeking
bourgeois respectability.

Coalitionism

One of the few constant elements in the New "Left
radicalism of the past ten years has been the denial of the
unique and leading role of the organized working class in the
socialist revolution. Replacements have been sought in "the
wretched of the earth," the "Third World," racial and ethnic
minorities in countries like the U.S., then the lumpens,
students and/or youth dropouts. Recently a spirit of ecumen-
ism has made itself felt in radical circles and all oppressed
social groups are expected to participate in the revolution on
an equal footing.

The strategy is seen as building a coalition of various
oppressed groups on a "program" achieved through the
multi-lateral trading of demands. For example, if the
women's liberation movement supports the repeal of anti-
strike legislation, the unions in turn are expected to support
the repeal of anti-abortion laws. The two most developed
advocates of coalitionism in the ostensibly Marxist U.S. left
are the Socialist Workers Party and the Labor Committe. The
SWP projects a coalition largely based on ethnic and sexual
groups around a petty-bourgeois Utopian program, while the
Labor Committee presents a coalition of economically
defined groups around a social-democratic program. Thus,
the SWP foresees a black, Chicano, women's, homosexuals'
and workers' revolution, while the LC looks forward to a
trade unionist, unemployed, welfare recipient, white-collar
and student soviet.

Its advocates see coalitionism as a means of fighting
economism. In actuality, coalitionism is simply another form
of economism. It is based on the central theoretical premise
of economism— that the working class cannot transcend (as
distinct from disregard or deny) its immediate sectional
interests and identify its interests with all the oppressed and
with the future of humanity. Coalitionism does not seek to
transform the consciousness of workers, but simply to gain
their acquiescence for some "other" group's "program" on
the basis of necessarily unstable bargains. To the extent that
they concern themselves with the labor movement at all,
coalition advocates perpetuate the view,, that workers are
selfish pigs whose political activities are correlated purely and
simply to their paychecks.

Working-Class Conservatism and
Petty-Bourgeois Utopianism

Revisionists and fakers feed upon the left's general lack of
familiarity with pre-Marxian socialism. Thus people are
permitted to call themselves Marxists while putting forward
the very ideas against which Marxism developed. A superfi-
cial view of Leninism is that it developed solely in opposition
to reformism and simple trade unionist consciousness. But
Bolshevism also developed in intense struggle against petty-
bourgeois Utopian radicalism, particularly in its anarchist
variant. As Lenin noted in Left-Wing Communism:

FALL 1972

23

"It is not yet sufficiently known abroad that Bolshevism
grew, took shape and became steeled in long years of
struggle against 'petty-bourgeois revolutionariness,' which
smacks of or borrows something from anarchism, and
which in all essentials falls short of the conditions and
requirements for sustained proletarian class struggle."

The hallmark of Utopian socialism is the belief that
socialist consciousness is based on a generalized moral sense,
unrelated to existing social relations. Utopian socialism
counterposes itself to Marxism by its denial that the
organized working class, driven by material exploitation
under capitalism, is uniquely the leading force in the socialist
revolution. On one plane, Utopian socialism is a reflection of
the moral and intellectual snobbery of the petty bourgeoisie.
Insofar as Utopian socialism concerns itself with attempting a
class analysis of the revolution, it usually locates the leading
force in the educated middle class, particularly the intelli-
gentsia, which is presumed to be genuinely concerned about
ideas, unlike the working class which presumably will sell oiit
socialist principles for a mess of porridge.

Working-Qass Progressivism
Existing working-class social attitudes certainly fall far
short of socialist consciousness. However, it is equally certain
that of the major classes in society, the working class is
everywhere the most socially progressive. It is the working-
class parties, even despite their treacherous bourgeoisified
reformist leaderships, that stand for more enlightened social
policies. In Catholic Europe and in Islam, it is the working-
class parties that carry the main burden of the struggle
against religious obscurantism. The distinctly non-economist
issue of divorce was an important factor in breaking the
alliance between the Italian social democrats and the
dominant bourgeois party, and has stood as a major obstacle
to the projected bloc between the Italian CP and left
Christian Democrats. In England the anti-capital-punishment
forces were overwhebtiingly concentrated in the Labour, nof
in the Conservative or Liberal, Party.

It is true that the relatively progressive social policies of
most workers' parties do not accurately reflect the mo^t
backward elements in the class. (Aspiring social democrats
use this as a justification for accommodating to the labor
bureaucracy, insisting that it is to the "left" of the "average"
worker.) All this shows is that working-class organizations
represent a higher form of political consciousness than
workers taken as atomized individuals in the manner of
pubhc opinion polls. This is because the activists and
organizers of workers' organizations represent a certain
selection, generally of the most conscious workers who have
already broken from personal "economism" and see them-
selves as representatives of broader class interests. Working-
class organizations are shaped by the attitudes of what Lenin
called "the advanced workers." Ideologically conservative
workers are almost always politically passive, forced by social
pressure 'against being activists in the right-wing bourgeois
parties.

Marxists' have always been profoundly aware of and
concerned with working-class conservatism. Genuine Marx-
ism, in contrast to Utopian moralism, locates and fights this
conservatism in the actual living conditions of workers. As
early as the Communist Manifesto, the demands for a
shdrtened work week to give workers the leisure necessary
for political and cultural activity, for the emancipation of

women, and for free universal higher education, for example,
have been an important aspect of revolutionary sociaUst
policy. The Utopian moralists have no program to counter
working-class backwardness, simply emitting cries of horror
coupled with occasional predictions that the working class
will be the vanguard of fascism.

Trade Unions and Revolution

An important anarcho-Maoist myth is that trade unions
are simply bargaining agents for particular groups of workers
and are inherently apolitical. While this may have been true
in the nineteenth century, when labor unions were weak,
defensive organizations, it is certainly not true now. In all
advanced capitalist countries, and particularly those which
have mass social-democratic parties, trade unions exercise
considerable influence in all aspects of political life. Even in
the U.S. in the 1960's-a period in which the unions were
regarded as particularly passive and bread-and-butter
oriented-the union bureaucracy was intimately involved in
the major social issues. Liberal union bureaucrats like Walter
Reuther helped finance the Southern civil rights movement
of the early 1 960's and played an important role in keeping
it within the limits of bourgeois reformism. Millions of
dollars in union dues are spent by union lobbyists seeking to
pressure Washington politicians. The deeply conservative
AFL-CIO central leadership under George Meany is one of
the few significant social bases remaining for a "hawk"
policy in Vietnam. The problem is not that the labor
movement is apolitical, but that it is tied to bourgeois
politics. The role of revolutionaries in the unions is not "to
divert the economic struggle to a poHtical struggle," but to
overthrow the conservative, reformist bureaucracy and pur-
sue a revolutionary policy on both the industrial and the
(political level.

To assert that trade unions are inherently parochial and
economist organizations is undialectical. All genuine class
organizations (e.g. unions, parties, factory committees) re-
flect the class struggle. To say that unions as such (i.e.,
simply as bargaining agencies for particular groups of
workers) cannot be revolutionary is a tautology. But unions
can give birth to other forms of organization (e.g. parties,
general strike committees, workers' councils) and can them-
selves provide the structure for a workers' insurrection,
ceasing then to function simply as "unions." As Trotsky,
who certainly knew something about the organization of
revolutions, said: "in spite of the enormous advantages of
Soviets as organs of struggle for power, there may well be
cases where the insurrection unfolds on the basis of other
forms of organization (factory committees, trade unions,
etc.)."

The radicalization of the masses must take place through
struggle within the mass organizations of the class, regardless
of form. It is not possible for revolutionary consciousness to
develop among the mass of workers without lengthy and
intense struggles and the intervention of communists in such
fundamental mass organizations as the unions. To term this
perspective "economism," as do the New Leftists, is to
transform "Leninism" into a justification for petty -bourgeois
Utopian-moralistic anti-Marxism. ■

[This article is adapted from a leaflet produced by the
Spartacist League of New Zealand.]

24

SPARTACIST

FALL 1972

The Faces of Economism

Revisionism is an attempt to attack tlie substance of
Marxism-Leninism without openly coming into conflict with
its great authority. Therefore revisionism often takes the
form of maintaining lip-service to traditional Marxist ter-
minology but re-defining (usually broadening) certain key
concepts in order to smuggle in a different political line. For
example the term "self-determination," which for Lenin
simply meant the ability of a nation to establish a separate
state, has been transformed, most notably by the Socialist
Workers Party, into the thoroughly Utopian reformist con-
cept of freedom from all oppression (class exploitation,
national and racial oppression, sexual oppression, etc.)
through separation or even "community control" within U.S.
capitalism.

While the term "economism" has not undergone so
grotesque a change, it also has been broadened well beyond
its Marxist meaning. For Lenin, the "economists" were a
distinct tendency in the Russian socialist movement which
held that socialists should concentrate on improving the
conditions of working-class life and leave the fight against
Czarist absolutism to the liberals. After One Step Forward,
Two Steps Back, Lenin rarely used the term and referred to
similar attitudes as reformism or narrow trade union con-
sciousness. Nevertheless the term "economism," which has
become an important part of the contemporary radical
vocabulary, need not be restricted to a purely historical
category. However it is essential that it not be given a

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meaning fundamentally subversive to Leninism, i.e. that
Lenin's authority not be put behind ideas alien to Marxism.

Anti-"Economism" as Anti-Materialist Spiritualism

Attacks on "economism" are a frequent rallying cry of
petty-bourgeois radicals whose response to labor reformism
and working-class backwardness is to reject the working class
as the driving force- of the revolution. The current popularity
of the term probably stems from its widespread use in the
Chinese "Cultural Revolution," where "economism" was
identified with a desire for a higher standard of living.
"Economist consciousness" was the sin of workers who
resisted the "Cultural Revolution"-that is, who were unwill-
ing to make the material sacrifices demanded of them by the
Maoist faction. The political thrust of the "anti-economism"
campaign was evident during the 1967 nationwide railway
strike, when Red Guards demanded that railway workers
accept a 1 2% pay cut and disregard standard safety regula-
tions. This would have concentrated greater economic
surplus in the hands of the Maoist bureaucracy, but would
not have significantly benefited the Chinese masses.

It is precisely the anti-materialist spiritual aspects of
Maoism— its rejection of the "consumer society" and Khrush-
chev's "goulash communism"-that provides the link
between the early New Left of Herbert Marcuse and the later
popularity of Third World anarcho-Maoism. The likes of
Robin Blackburn of the British New Left Review and Rudi
Deutschke of the German SDS can be considered transitional
figures.

Anarcho-Maoist attacks on working-class "economism"
are similar to Victorian conservative attacks on "the intense
selfishness of the lower classes" (the phrase is from Kipling,
poet laureate of British imperialism). These attitudes are
generally voiced by genuine reactionaries. Marshal Petain
blamed the fall of France on the "love of pleasure of the
French common people." As George Orwell once remarked,
this statement is seen in its proper perspective if we compare
the amount of pleasure in the life of the average French
worker or peasant with Petain 's own!

The anti-Marxist perversion of the term "economism" by
the Maoists and their New Left sycophants reflects fear of
and contempt for the working masses on the part of
petty-bourgeois strata. In the case of the Chinese bureaucra-
cy, it is a real fear that the aspirations and organization of
the Chinese working class threaten its privileged position. In
the case of the Western radical intelligentsia, it is a belief that
the social backwardness and cultural narrowness of the
working masses threaten its life styles-both bourgeois and
"liberated"— and values.

What Is Economism?

In the most general sense, economism is the failure of ih^
working class to embrace its historic role, pr in Marx'S' words,
failure to realize that the proletariat cannot liberate itself
without "destroying all the inhuman conditions of life in
contemporary society." (The Holy Family) In other words,
(Continued on page 22)

SPARTAOST

NUMBER 22

WINTER 1973-74

35 CENTS

The Struggle for
Trotskyism in Ceylon

by Edmund Samarakkody

The Editorial Board of Spartacist is proud
to bring to our readers an important
article making accessible to Trotskyists in
the U.S. and internationally an analysis of the
history and degeneration of the Trotskyist
movement in Ceylon. This understanding is
crucial for the rebirth of Trotskyism in Cey-
lon. The Ceylon experience has profound les-
sons for our movement, especially in the un-
derdeveloped countries, in the struggle to
build sections of an authentic Fourth Interna-
tional rooted in the working class.

The author, Edmund Samarakkody, is
uniquely qualified to comment on this experi-
ence. A veteran Trotskyist militant and cur-
rently spokesman for the Revolutionary Work-
ers Party of Ceylon, Comrade Samarakkody
was a founding leader of the Ceylon section
of the Fourth International. His early experi-
ence dates back to trade-union organizing for
the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) in the
years before World War II. During the war,
Comrade Samarakkody, along with other cen-
tral leaders of the LSSP, was interned by the
British and, following his escape, was in-
volved in coordinating the activities of the il-
legalized LSSP. He then joined other leaders
of the LSSP in temporary emigration to India—
a crucial internationalizing experience for the
Ceylonese Trotskyists— until the endof the war.

Comrade Samarakkody's oppositional his-
tory began in 1957, when he and other left
militants in the LSSP resisted the LSSP's
accommodation to the bourgeois nationalist
Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP). Particularly
crucial in understanding the degeneration of
the international Trotskyist movement is the
(continued next page)

Edmund Samarakkody

USec Covers Up Tampoe
Scandal ... 25

Letter to the OCRFI and
the OCI...32

. . . Ceylon

light cast by Comrade Samarakkody's article
on the wretched role of the Pabloist Interna-
tional Secretariat (now United Secretariat) in
acquiescing to the LSSP's accommodationist
policy toward the SLFP until the U.Sec. revi-
sionists were at last forced to disavow the
LSSP when the LSSP entered the SLFP-led
popular-front government of Mrs. Bandara-
naike in 1964, As the article demonstrates, both
the Pabloists of the U.Sec. and the Healyites
(International Committee) must seek to ignore
the real history of the LSSP before 1964 in
order to conceal their own complicity, dictated
by their pervasive opportunism.

After the 1964 debacle, the U.Sec. re-
visionists denounced the LSSP's entry into the
government and backed the LSSP (Revolution-
ary), led by the trade-union bureaucrat Bala
Tampoe, which split in opposition to the entry
into the government. Within the LSSP(R) Com-
rade Samarakkody led a left opposition against
the Tampoe leadership. After two years of
struggle. Comrade Samarakkody and his sup-
porters left the LSSP(R) following a Special
Conference (18-19 April 1968) and constituted
the Revolutionary Samasamaja Party (now
Revolutionary Workers Party) of Ceylon.

As part of his continuing political battle
against the revisionists, Comrade Samarak-
kody was instrumental in bringing to the atten-

1 The fake-Trotskylst "United Secretariat" was
formed in 1963 as a result of the reunifi-
cation of the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.)
led by Farrell Dobbs with the "International
Secretariat" (I.S.) of Michel Pablo, Ernest
Mandel, Pierre Frank and Livio Maitan. The
SWP had broken with the I.S. in 1953 in pro-
test against Pablo's liquidation of the sections
of the Fourth International into the dominant
Stalinist and social -democratic parties. The
"reunification" amounted to a non-agression
pact, sweeping under the rug issues which had
divided ostensibly Trotskyist forces for a
decade, and codified the SWP's capitulation to
Pabloism by calling for support to bourgeois
nationalists and peasant guerrillaists in the
backward countries.

2 The Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP-Cey-
lon Socialist Party) was founded in 1935 by a
group of young, British-trained intellectuals.
During its early years the LSSP was a loose
mass organization committed to socialism but

tion of the world Trotskyist movement the
fundamentally corrupt role of Bala Tampoe,
through forcing a special Commission on
Ceylon at the "Ninth World Congress" of the
U.Sec. in April 1969. Following the U.Sec. 's
suppression of the accusations against Tampoe
and the findings of the U.Sec. 's own Commis-
sion, Comrade Samarakkody transmitted to us
the actual reports of this Commission, which
we published in Spartacist #21 (Fall 1972).

■^The Editors

During a period of two decades up^to 1964,
it was the claim of the leaders of the
"United Secretariat of the Fourth Internation-
al"! that the LSSP 2 was the strongest
Trotskyist mass party within the "world or-
ganisation." Undoubtedly, the LSSP was the
working-class-based party with the widest
mass base. It was in the leadership of a
considerable sector of the trade-union move-,
ment and had strong support among sec-
tions of the peasantry and of the urban
petty bourgeoisie. It had a reputation for in-
transigence in its opposition to capitalism-
imperialism and for its incorruptible and
militant leadership of the working class and
toilers, and as a champion of the rights of the
Tamil- speakii^ minority. 3 In the words of
Ernest Mandel, a leader of the United Secre-
tariat, "Colvin R. de Silva and Leslie Guna-
wardena were brilliant Marxist thinkers who
have written some of the best revolutionary

with a basically reformist program. The Sta-
linist wing led by Pieter Keuneman was ex-
pelled in 1940 in the wake of the Hitler-Stalin
pact and the Stalinists' flipflops in their
attitudes toward the Second World vVar. The
LSSP opposed the war, causing the British to
jail its leaders.

3 A minority of southern Indian descent. One
section of the Tamils has been on the island
from early, pre-colonial, times. The great ma-
jority, who make up the bulk of Ceylonese plan-
tation workers, were originally imported by the
British in the middle and late 19th century to
work on coffee and later tea estates. Tamils
make up roughly 10 percent of Ceylon's popu-
lation. However, in 1949 several hundred thou-
sand Tamil plantation workers (who had had the
right to vote since 1931) were disenfranchised.
Since then discriminatory citizenship require-
ments have made the great majority of Tamils
officially stateless, without legal rights in
either Ceylon or India.

Note: All footnotes and bracketed material, except that Initialed "E.S.," are by the Spartacist editors.

WINTER 1973-74

3

pamphlets in South East Asia. . . . They un-
doubtedly assimilated the whole body of the
basic Trotskyist concepts."-*

However, it was the same party, the LSSP,
with its reputation for revolutionary intran-
sigence, and with its "brilliant Marxist
thinkers," that ignominiously collapsed in June
1964, when, by a majority decision, it entered
a coalition government with the SLFP,^ the par-
ty of the so-called national or liberal bour-
geoisie, just whenthebankruptcy of the policies
of the Sirima Bandaranaike government was
becoming manifest to the working class and
toilers and when conditions were ripening for
the development of mass~ struggle against the
government and the capitalist class.

Not only did this reputed Trotskyist party
join the ranks of the opportunists by this alli-
ance with the bourgeoisie for the betrayal of
the masses, but in 1971, it became directly
responsible for the worst massacre of youth
ever known inCeylonor elsewhere— the police-
army killings by shooting and torture of thou-
sands of youth who rose in revolt against the
capitalist coalition government. And, it is this
party that today, together with the Stalinists,
is sustaining a capitalist regime which is pre-
paring the road, in the manner of the Allendes,
for an open military dictatorship.

But why did this happen? How did this "Trot-
skyist" party collapse and join the ranks of
Stalinist and social-democratic betrayers?

We shall let the same Ernest Mandel of the
United Secretariat answer this question. Here
is his explanation in his article published in
the International Socialist Review in the fall of
1964. "It was never a secret to any member
of the world Trotskyist movement, informed
about the special problems of the Fourth Inter-
national, that the section in Ceylon, the Lanka
Sama Samaja Party, was an organisation to
which the term 'Trotskyist' had to be applied
with a series of specific reservations...."
Mandel, it would appear, had never any doubts
about the character of the LSSP, According to
him "the group of Trotskyist intellectuals sud-
denly found themselves at the head of the largest
working-class organisation in the country. . , .

However, the party which they led could not
really be called 'Bolshevik'."

Mandel 's dilemma in characterisation of
this party is understandable. For over two
decades, the LSSP was the Ceylon unit of the
International Secretariat (I.S.) and later United
Secretariat (U.Sec), which claimed to be the
continuation of the organisation founded by
Trotsky, Mandel and the leaders of the United
Secretariat were called upon to explain how
such a party as the LSSP could have remained
a unit of an international organisation claiming
to be Trotskyist: It was this question that Man-
del has failed to answer. And his failure to face
up to this question could well be the reason why
he resorted to equivocation in regard to the
character of this party.

In the view of Mandel, the LSSP had a hybrid
character, "It was a party that combined left-
socialist trade-union cajdres, revolutionary
workers who had gained class consciousness
but not specifically revolutionary -Marxist ed-
ucation, and a few hundred genuine revolu-
tionary-Marxist cadres. . . .

"In fact, while being formally a Trotskyist
party, the LSSP functioned in several areas
comparably to a left Social Democratic party in
a relatively 'prosperous' semi-colonial coun-
try; i.e. it was the main electoral vehicle of
the poor masses, it provided the main leader-
ship of the trade unions."

If indeed "the LSSP functioned in several
areas comparably to a left Social Democratic
party," and if indeed it was functioning as
"the main electoral vehicle of the poor
masses," it was by no means difficult to under-
stand how the leaders of this party accepted
portfolios in a bourgeois government in 1964
and have continued along this road thereafter.

But if, as Mandel insists, this was a "de-
feat for Trotskyism in Ceylon" it is necessary
to ascertain what precisely in his view led
to this defeat, "The defeat suffered by Trot-
skyism in Ceylon," says Mandel, "is therefore
essentially the story of how and why the Colvin
R. de Silva and Leslie Gunawardena group
["Marxist"— E.S.] lost leadership of the party
(continued next page)

4 Ernest Germain, "Peoples Frontism in Cey-
lon: From Wavering to Capitulation," Interna-
tional Socialist Review, Fall 1964.

5 The Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) origi-
nated in 1951 when S.SV.R.D. Bandaranaike
split from the until-then dominant United Na-
tional Party (UNP) amid widespread uneasiness

in the ruling class over the rampant corruption
of the UNP government. Bandaranaike, former
right-hand man of UNP leader D.S. Senanayake,
combined a program of virulent Sinhalese
chauvinism and Buddhist clericalism with timid
land reform. His SLFP appealed particu-
larly to the Sinhalese peasantry and rural
intelligentsia.

. . . Ceylon

through their own weaknesses and inner
contradictions...."

Mandel mentions these "weaknesses and
inner contradictions"— the fatal flaw was that
these key political leaders did not occupy
themselves with full time party work— they
remained part-time leaders ... the leaders of
the genuinely Trotskyist wing of the LSSP
did not change their daily lives to accord with
their revolutionary conAactions.f s

While the "weaknesses and inner contra-
dictions of the leaders" were real, it is
necessary for revolutionary Marxists to go
beyond the personal qualities of the leaders of
an ostensibly revolutionary party to ascertain
why such a party betrayed the revolutionary
movement and the masses. Mandel is com-
pletely wrong in stating that the weaknesses of
the leaders were "essentially" the cause of
the LSSP collapse. This is plain subjectivism.

Mandel's dilemma remains. He and the other
leaders of the United Secretariat were not
prepared to accept their share of responsi-
bility for the collapse of the LSSP, which for
two decades was accepted as a section of
the International Secretariat, later United
Secretariat.

The formal acceptance of the program can
never be the test of a revolutionary Marxist
party. That is of course a commonplace. On
the other hand, what is basic to the Leninist
concept of the party is the basing of the politics
of the party on the revolutionary program and
above all on activity in a revolutionary
perspective.

And, in regard to the LSSP, there was not
even a formal acceptance of a Trotskyist pro-
gram, because in reality there was no program
as such. What was termed the program, as late
as 1950 (unity congress) was only a listing of
"fundamental aims," a brief explanation of a
transitional program, a list of transitional de-
mands and the positions of the party on impe-

6 Germain, op. cit.

The Bolshevik Samasamaja Party grew out of
a 1942 factional polarization and split in the
LSSP, which resulted in two groups both call-
ing themselves "the LSSP" operating in Cey-
lon during the later years of the war. The
more leftist group remained affiliated with
the BLP(India) and after the war a BLPI
letter of 8 October 1945 expelling the leaders

rialist war, defense of the Soviet Union, on
Stalinist parties and popular-frontism.

A Marxist analysis of the socio-economic
factors in the country, class forces and class
relations, the character of the Ceylon revolu-
tion and the dynamics of the Ceylon revolution
—all these issues had no place in this "pro-
gram"! Documents on programmatic questions
were never the heritage of the party. Nor could
the leaders of the United Secretariat, the
Mandels and Pierre Franks, point to any inter-
vention on their part with the LSSP in this
regard.

1942 Split

The existence, from the beginning, of a
Marxist wing in this social-democratic type
party was the real hope for this party. And
indeed, the leaders of the [International]
correctly looked to this group for the revolu-
tionary orientation of this party.

And the opportunity came to this group and
also to the leaders of the [International],
when the first split took place in the LSSP be-
tween the Philip Gunawardena/N.M. Perera
reformist section and the Leslie [Guna-
wardena]/Colvin [R. de Silva]/Bernard [Soysa]
Marxist section in 1942.

It was the attempt on the part of the Marxist
wing to re-organise the party programmati-
cally and organisationally on Bolshevik lines
that led to opposition from the Philip Gunawar-
dena/N.M. Perera reformist wing and to the
split of 1942. The expulsion of Philip Gunawar-
dena and N.M. Perera from the International
and the acceptanceof the Bolshevik Samasama-
ja Party (BSP)''as the Ceylon unit created
favourable conditions for the building of the
revolutionary party.

Although at the commencement the politics
of the split were not altogether clear to the
rank and file of the BSP, the further evolution
of the N.M./Phtlip group brought into the open
the different orientations. For instance, the
N.M./Philip group gave proof of its deep-
seated opportunism when the parliamentary
fraction of their party refused to vote against
the status of "independence" granted by the

of the rightist group (N.M. Perera and Philip
Gunawardena) formalized the split. Following
an abortive attempt in late 1946 to reunify the
two groups, the leftist group led by Leslie
Goonewardene, Colin de Silva, Samarakkody,
de Souza and others, which was the smaller
group, changed its name to the BSP. However,
on 4 June 1950 the two groups were reunified
to form the LSSP, with a grouping around Phi-
lip Gunawardena splitting away to the right.

WINTER 1973-74

1

British in 1947. The BSP fraction however
voted against this fake independence, s

On the other hand, during the seven years of
its independent existence, the BSP took mean-
ingful steps to raise the ideological level of
the party, develop revolutionary cadre and
direct trade=union and other mass activities
in a revolutionary perspective.

Unification

However, this favourable development for
Trotskyism in Ceylon received a setback when
the BSP decided onunification with the reform-
ist N.M. Perera/Philip Gunawardena group
(LSSP), which had, during this , period, only
strengthened its reformism, both in its trade-
union and parliamentary activities.

And what is more, the unification was
effected without any discussion on the funda-
mental problems of the Ceylon revolution,
strategy and tactics, on Stalinism, reformism
and parliamentarism. It was the failure of the
Marxist wing (BSP) that no document giving
the correct orientation on these relevant issues
was adopted at this unification. Only the "pro-
gram" which we have already referred to was
adopted. This "program" was so sketchy and
only in outline, that the N.M. Perera wing had no
difficulty in taking the party along their reform-
ist course.

This unification, which proved disastrous
for the future of Trotskyism in Ceylon, never-
theless received the approval of the leaders
of the United Secretariat (then the International
Secretariat). And what is more, it was their
view that a policy of co-existence with the N.
M. Perera reformist wing was correct for the
Marxist group. In the view of Mandel, "the
problem of overcoming the old divisions and of
blocking anything that could precipitate a new
split with N.M. Perera became an obsession
among the key political leaders.^ The policy
was correct in itself since unification had taken
place on a principled basis and since the party's
activities as a whole were proceeding in
accordance with the general program of Trot-
skyism."^ [our emphasis— E.S.]

General Program of Trotskyism

The program of Trotskyism in Ceylon had
to be linked to the problems of the Ceylon
revolution.

As in all backward countries, Ceylon had
(1950) and still continues to have uncompleted
tasks of the democratic revolution. The "Soul-
bury Constitution," which was a deal between
the Ceylonese bourgeoisie and the British
imperialists, brought only fake independence.
While there was political independence over a
large area, yet there was room for imperialist
interference and control, even politically. In
any event, the economic dominance of British
imperialism continued through the ownership
and control by the British of the best tea and
rubber plantations and the agency houses,
which controlled the exports of all agricultural
products and which also had a major share of
the imports for the plantation sector. The oper-
ation of British and other foreign-owned banks,
and the open-door policy for British and other
imperialist investments reducedpolitical free-
dom to a fiction.

Twenty -five years after the grant of so-
called Independence and the adoption of a new
constitution with republican status (1971), the
socio-economic policies of Ceylon, over a
large area, cannot be decided by a Ceylon
Cabinet, but by the IMF (International Mone-
tary Fund) and the imperialists!

The revolutionary wing (BSP) which cor-
rectly denounced and rejected the Soulbury
Constitution as "fake independence" while the
N.M. Perera wing silently endorsed the bour-
geois interpretations in that regard, failed to
raise this question of the Soulbury Constitu-
tion with the N.M. Perera wing at the 1950
unification. Thus by implication the BSP en-
dorsed the opportunism of the N.M, Perera
wing.

This meant that the unified LSSP adopted,
by implication, a view that the bourgeoisie
of a backward country in the middle of the
20th century has been able to accomplish a
basic task of the bourgeois democratic revo-

(continued next page)

8 The British government granted Ceylon a
Constitution recommended by the Soulbury
Commission in 1946 in order to placate de-
mands for political independence following the
war. This constitution retained an appointed
Governor-General who retained control over
foreign affairs, defense and minority rights.
The constitution did not even provide dominion

status— "independence" within the Common-
wealth—which was granted separately in 1948.
Other agreements guaranteed the British con-
tinued use of military bases on Ceylon and
other privileges.

9 Germain, op. cit.

6

SPARTACIST

. . . Ceylon

lution, i.e. the achievement of national liber-
ation from imperialism. This meant that the
LSSP was in conflict with the central thesis of
the permanent revolution, that, having arrived
belatedly, a congenitally weak bourgeoisie in a
backward country is incapable of playing a
leading role in the democratic revolution;
that on the contrary, this bourgeoisie is
counter-revolutionary; that the tasks of the
bourgeois democratic revolution could be ac-
complished only by the proletariat (dictator-
ship of the proletariat) in alliance with the
peasantry and in the teeth of the opposition
of the native bourgeoisie— whether they be the
compradors or the so-called national
bourgeoisie.

The false and untenable assumption that the
bourgeois democratic tasks had been acconl-
plished by the Ceylonese bourgeoisie led the
LSSP to virtually ignore thereafter— (a) the
struggle for completing Ceylon's independence;
(b) the struggle for minority rights of the 2
million Tamil-speaking people; (c) the struggle
of the peasants for the land; and (d) the ending
of the oppression and discrimination of the
so-called depressed castes.

It was thus that the LSSP had no program
to develop the anti-imperialist struggle al-
though the party was opposed to imperialism.
And it was thus that the LSSP had no program
to develop the struggle of the peasants for
land although the LSSP did demand land for the
landless.

Although the LSSP supported the language
and other rights of the Tamil minority and
called for the acceptance of Tamil as an
official langviage together with the Sinhala
language, and also called for citizenship
rights for the Tamil plantation workers, it
did not have a strategy for implementing
these demands.

It was thus that the LSSP failed to carry on
a consistent struggle for the completion of
Ceylon's independence, for the abolition of the

10 The United National Party (UNP) was es-
tablished by the plutocrat D.S. Senanayake in
June 1946 and took over the government from
the British in the 1947 election. Senanayake had
split from the Ceylon National Congress, a
loose pro-independence, exclusively Sinhalese,
bourgeois formation when the CNC admitted
the Stalinists during World War U.

Soulbury Constitution. The party failed to raise
the slogan of a Constituent Assembly.

The refusal of the LSSP to face the reality
of the uncompleted democratic tasks gave the
Ceylon bourgeoisie an unexpected opportunity
to pose as the friends of the peasantry and to
win over the petty -bourgeois masses generally,
by putting on the mask of nationalism and talk-
ing the language of freedom fighters.

Enter Bandaranaike

S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, who broke with the
UNP 10 on the succession to D.S. Senanayake,
was quick to take the opportunity. Raising the
slogans of "Sinhalese language only" as the of-
ficial language to replace English, "Give back
the military bases," "Take over of foreign-
owned estates," "End feudal relations in land,"
Bandaranaike was soon leading the mass move-
ment, especially the peasants and lower middle
class intelligentsia. From a leader of a small
party of eight members in parliament, Ban-
daranaike found himself swept topowerinl956
(MEP— the 1st Bandaranaike Government), n

Although Bandaranaike and his SLFP soon
showed their state of bankruptcy in regard to
(a) the anti-imperialist struggle; (b) winning
of land to the peasants; and (c) the grant of
minority rights and so-called economic devel-
opment, this party (SLFP) of the so-called
national bourgeoisie was able to keep itself
at the centre of the political stage during a
period of nearly 17 years up to the present due
to the wrong policies of the LSSP in regard to
the so-called national or liberal bourgeoisie.

The Ceylonese bourgeoisie had, right up to
the war period, remained a plantation and mer-
cantile bourgeoisie. Their interests more or
less dove-tailed with imperialist interests;
they functioned in the perspective of continued
co-existence with imperialism. They were
the classic compradors.

However, it was inevitable that capitalist
development in Ceylon would, even late, take
the road of industrialisation. This meant that
a differentiation within the bourgeoisie would
sooner or later lead to the emergence of the
industrial-minded bourgeoisie. And it could

iiThe Mahajama Eksath Peramuna (MEP—
People's United Front) was formed in February
1956 as a coalition of the SLFP with various
religious and Sinhalese chauvinist groups and
the "LSSP" of Philip Gunawardena. When the
Bandaranaike government collapsed in 1958-
59, the Gunawardena group took the name
MEP for themselves in subsequent election
campaigns.

V

WINTER 1973-74

7

have been expected that this new section of
the bourgeoisie would be in a state of conflict
with the older plantation bourgeoisie or their
party, the UNP, which had control of state
power.

It was the existence of this new sector of
the bourgeoisie— the industrial-minded sec-
tor—that found its reflection in the split away
of Bandaranaike from the UNP (1951). Further,
it was precisely the significance of this differ-
entiation within the bourgeoisie that the LSSP,
which according to Mandel, "functioned in ac-
cordance with the general program of Trot-
skyism," failed to understand.

"National" or "Liberal"
Bourgeoisie

The character and the role of the so-called
national or liberal bourgeoisie in the backward
countries was too well known, especially in the
Trotskyist movement, by the time this differ-
entiation took place in Ceylon. The tragedy of
the Chinese revolution (1927), thp triumph of
Franco in Spain (1936-39), and the failure of
the revolutionary movements in India and the
other countries of Asia were basically linked
to the failure of ostensible revolutionaries to
understand the nature of the so-called national
-bourgeoisie, who seek to use the masses, not
for struggle against imperialism but to win
concessions from the imperialist masters.

The principal lesson derived from Marxist
experience in this regard was that this sector
of the bourgeoisie, while being capable of occa-
sional but weak oppositional actions against
imperialism, cannot, with any degree of con-
sistency, develop any real . confrontation with
imperialism. In the context of the reality of thfe
class struggle, the so-called national or liberal
bourgeoisie must necessarily betray the strug-
gle for national liberation and enter into treach-
erous compromises with imperialism. "The
more to the East," said Trotsky, "the more
treacherous were the bourgeoisie." That
meant, the more belatedly they arrive, the more
treacherous they are.

While revolutionary Marxists would give
critical support to some oppositional actions
of the so-called national bourgeoisie, they are
vinequi vocally opposed to national bourgeois
regimes; it remains their task to carry on a
consistent and irreconcilable struggle to ex-
pose their real role of treachery to the national
liberation struggle and to wrest the leadership
of the national struggle from their hands.

The regimes of the so-called national or lib-
eral bourgeoisie in Ceylon (SLFP, SLFP-LSSP,

SLFP-LSSP-CP) have brought about a belated
but limited development of the manufacturing
industries, not in conflict with imperialism,
but jointly with foreign capitalists, whether in
the public or private sector, undermining in
this process the political independence of the
ct)untry.

It is precisely this question of the so-called
national or liberal bourgeoisie— the Bandara-
naike question— that LSSP leaders failed to
understand in the light of Marxist experience.
In the result, the leadership followed empiri-
cally a zig zag policy, which inevitably led
them into the coalition government with the
SLFP in 1964.

The 1953 Hartal— A Semi- Insurrection

It was in this state of ideological confusion
and uncertainty that the LSSP was confronted
with the opportunity of leading the masses in
Ceylon's first revolutionary mass struggle
against the government and the capitalist class
reaching to the level of a semi-insurrection.

With the end of the Korean boom andthe fall
in the prices of the main exports, tea and
rubber, the capitalist UNP government decided
to maintain the profit levels of the capitalist
and vested interests by imposing drastic cuts on
social services and by the increase in price of
i^ationed rice. vVhile the price of rice was raised
from =/25 cents to =/70 cents [Ceylon cur-
rency] per measure, the government withdrew
the free mid-day meal to school children and
itiidr eased postal fares and train fares.

The LSSP took the lead in developing mass
agitation on these issues. But even while the
mass movement was visibly growing around
these issues, the leaders of the LSSP, who had
empirically moved into a struggle gituation,
failed to see the revolutionary possibilities in
the situation. Their perspectives did not go be-
yond mass protest action against the actions
and policies of the government.

In this context, the LSSP leaders were taken
by surprise by the response of the masses to
the one-day protest action that was decided
upon.

Though acting empirically, the LSSP cor-
rectly applied the tactic of the united front. The
Philip Gunawardena group (MEP), the Stalinists
and even the Federal Party (bourgeois-led
Tamil minority Party) were pushed into becom-
ing the co-sponsors of the Hartari2 action.

The withdrawal of work (strike action) of

> , (continued next page)

1? A political mass strike.

SPARTACiST

. . . Ceylon

the workers supported by the closing of busi-
ness and the stoppage of work by peasants and
other self-employed people, all of whom re-
sorted to direct action struggle by barricading
roads, cutting down trees and telephone posts,
stopping of buses and trains— all this turned
into a real confrontation with the armed forces
of the government. What occurred was a semi-
insurrection in which the masses fought the
police and the army with stones and clubs and
whatever they found by way of weapons. Nine
persons were killed by police shooting.

What the working class and the masses that
were in the struggle looked forward to was not
a mere one -day protest action and a return to
work the following day. They were in readiness
for a struggle to overthrow the hated UNP gov-
ernment. In fact, this direct action of the mass-
es continued on the next day also. There were
clear possibilities of this Hartal action being
continued for several days thereafter. But the
LSSP leadership, despite the unmistakable
moods of the workers and other sections of
the masses, decided to keep to their plan of
a mere protest action and called off the Hartal
and prevented the masses from continuing
the struggle.

Dynamics of the Ceylon Revolution

What the LSSP leadership had failed to de-
velop theoretically— the dynamics of the Ceylon
revolution— the Hartal struggle showed in prac-
tise, even in outline. The following features
were prominently silhouetted', in the political
scene;

1. Contrary to the misgivings of the LSSP
leaders (which some of them developed into
theories later), the Ceylonese masses were not
so steeped in parliamentarism that they would
first have to go through a long parliamentary
period before they got on to the road of revolu-
tionary struggle. The Hartal showed that,
given a revolutionary leadership, the masses
could soon shed their parliamentary illusions
and enter the road of mass struggle leading to
the revolution itself.

2. The masses did not divide the Ceylon rev-
olution into two stages, (a) an anti -imperialist
and anti-feudal stage and (b) an anti-capitalist
stage. The democratic revolution and the so-
cialist revolution were telescoped in a single
struggle. The issues that brought the masses
into revolutionary struggle were issues arising

out of imperialist capitalist oppression— in-
crease of price of rice, train fares, postal
fares, etc. The capitalist class had the need
to save foreign exchange through a cut in the
ration of rice and cutting down of social ser-
vices for the maintaining of capitalist profit
levels. The uncompleted democratic tasks,
completing of independence, and the ending of
minority and caste oppression could be accom-
plished only in the course of the socialist
revolution.

Despite their so-called two-stage theory,
the Stalinists found themselves taken along
into an anti-capitalist struggle and an uprising
against a capitalist government. Also, con-
trary to their so-called theory, they were
shown in practise that the anti -UNP struggle
could not be separated from the anti-capitalist
struggle.

3. Again, contrary to the orientation of the
Stalinists and later also of the LSSP, it was
not the so-called progressive bourgeoisie or
petty bourgeoisie that led the masses in this
struggle, but the proletariat. Led by the LSSP,
it was the working class that took the leading
role in this struggle. The urban and rural
petty bourgeoisie, the peasants and the stu-
dents and youth all followed the leadership
of the working class. The party of the so-called
progressive bourgeoisie, the Bandaranaike-
led SLFP, was not ready, even to be one of
the sponsors of the Hartal action.

4. The alliance of the proletariat and the
peasantry, which is basic to the Ceylon revo-
lution, was achieved in action. The struggle
showed that it was not necessary for the prole-
tariat to form a political alliance with a bour-
geois or petty-bourgeois party in order to
win the peasantry. The peasantry can be won
to the side of the proletariat on the basis of
support for their burning issues in opposition
to the bourgeoisie.

The LSSP leadership failed to draw the
lessons of this Hartal experience. It failed to
theoretically evaluate the events of this semi-
insurrection and relate them to the theory of
the permanent revolution as it applied to Cey-
lon, a backward country. The LSSP leadership
failed to realise that what was urgent and un-
postponable was the raising of the ideological
level of the party in the perspective of devel-
oping into a Bolshevik-type revolutionary com-
bat party.

Politics of the International
Secretariat

We have already noted that in the view of
Mandel, in the post unification years (LSSP-

WINTER 1973-74

9

BSP), the LSSP's "activities as a whole were
proceeding in accordance with the general
program of Trotskyism."

Thus, in the view of the International Sec-
retariat, there was no occasion for any serious
intervention on its part in regard to the LSSP.

The truth in this regard was that, with the
new turn of the I.S. in 1951 (3rd Congress)
under the guidance of Pablo, there could not be,
in their view, any problems for the LSSP in
regard to ideological development or the build-
ing of a Bolshevik-type party.

According to the thesis of the 3rd Congress
there was no need to build independent Trot-
skyist parties; what was necessary was to
take the "quickest road to the masses" where-
ever they be, in the Stalinist or other reform-
ist parties, for "the integrating" of the revolu-
tionary Marxist cadre deeply into the so-called
real movement of the masses.

The same thesis of the 3rd Congress left
the door open for an interpretation that the
Stalinist parties have transformed themselves
from road-blocks to the proletarian revolution
into parties that are capable of taking the
revolutionary road.

It was against this liquidationist turn of the
International that the SWP (United States) -led
minority revolted and split in 1953. On the
first news of the split the LSSP leadership
leaned on the side of the minority and appeared
to be willing to take up the struggle against
Pabloist revisionism andliquidationism, Butin
the state of ideological confusion that reigned
in the LSSP and its leadership, and in the con-
text of the theoretical weakness of the Inter-
national Committee (IC), i3 the leaders of the
LSSP wavered and jumped on to the band-
wagon of the majority led by the Mandels,
Pierre Franks and the Livios.

In reality, the liquidationist and revisionist
line of Pablo, according to which there is no
need to build independent Marxist parties, and
according to which what was urgent was the
"integration into the living movement of the
masses"— all this dovetailed into the orienta-
tion of the LSSP leaders whose pre-occupation
was developing mass activity— in the trade
unions and in the electorates without revolu-
tionary perspective.

1953 Split

On the other hand, the Pabloist pro-Stalinist

13 The International Committee was formed by
those sections of the Fourth International who
broke from the Pabloist International Sec-
retariat in 1953, The IC included the SWP

orientation found more than a responsive echo
with the Henry Peiris-led faction which
emerged in the party in the fall of 1952. P' res-
olution of this faction, led by Henry Peiris, Wil-
liam Silva and T.B. Subasinghe, "declared that
in the elections the party should have put for-
ward the slogan of a 'Democratic Government
which would have meant, at its lowest level,
a Bandaranaike government, and at its highest
level, a Government by a Sama Samaja major-
ity'." It also took the position "that the party
should enter into the closest possible agree-
ment and co-operation with the CP and Philip
group in the trade union and political fields"
Xshort History of the LSSP).

This was clearly the moment to investi-
gate into the roots of reformism and Stalinism
that had grown within the LSSP, to draw up a
balance sheet of the efforts of the LSSP to
move in a Trotskyist direction. In fact, all the
basic questions of Trotskyism, the program,
the application of the theory of the permanent
revolution, the character of the Ceylon revo-
lution, the role of the "national" bourgeoisie,
questions of strategy and tactics, the Leninist
concept of the party, were the issues that were
involved in this factional struggle that burst
into the open.

But the LSSP leadership conducted the fight
against the reformists and Stalinists within the
party by their own empirical methods and in
an ad hoc manner, counterposing Trotskyist
orthodoxy to the politics of the revisionists,
very much in the manner of the SWP in 1953
when it opposed the line of the 3rd Congress.
In the result, the factional struggle did not lead
to the focusing of attention on the fundamental
questions that were clearly posed before the
entire party. Nor did the factional struggle
help even to educate the membership of the
party and to raise their ideological level,
especially when the party was moving deeper
into parliamentary politics, where Bandara-
naike was soon to become the principal actor.

Responsive Co-operation

Having failed to understand the role of the
so-called national bourgeoisie, the LSSP lead-
ership was at a loss to know how to deal with
the Bandaranaike -led MEP government that
(continued next page)

led by J.P, Cannon, the majority of the
French section led by Bleibtreu-Lambert, and
the British grouping led by G. Healy.

. . . Ceylon

was formed after the 1956 parliamentary
electionSo

Succumbing to the mass hysteria and en-
thusiasm at the election victory of the MiEP
to office, the LSSP announced its attitude to the
new government as one of "responsive co-
operation." It was of course necessary to note
the popularity of the MEP government. It was
undoubtedly imperative for the LSSP to take
note of the prevailing mass sentiment and the
mass moods in relation to the first Bandara-
naike government, before the party decided on
its tactics in the situation. But it was un-
pardonable for a party claiming to be rev-
olutionary Marxist to resort to equivocal
formulae, and echo mass illusions when it was
imperative to categorically state party posi-
tions. And in this case, it was the question of
correctly characterising the MEP government
which was a bourgeois bonap artist government
that was seeking to deceive the masses with
nationalist and socialist phraseology. It was
the duty of the LSSP to patiently explain to the
masses regarding the truth about the character
of this government. On the contrary, the LSSP
chose the occasion to opportunistically go along
with the masses, whilst keeping the door open
for later criticism of the government when the
mass moods underwent a change.

The Mandels, Pierre Franks and the Livios
of the I.S. looked on from a distance. They
never once in this regard expressed their
views on the LSSP line on this question. Either
it was the case of the I.S. approving the LSSP
line in this regard, or the I.S. did not seek to
interfere in the internal affairs of a section
of the International on the basis of its real
orientation, that the Revolutionary Interna-
tional is a sum of several national parties
that function independently of the International
centre!

However, it was the Bandaranaike MEP re-
gime itself that gave the LSSP the opportunity
to re=assess the character of this government.
Before long, the bankruptcy of "Bandaranaik6
principles" became evident to a section of the
masses. It was to conceal this bankruptcy
that Bandaranaike resorted to communalism
that led to the worst anti-Tamil riots in Ceylon
(1956-1958). And what was particularly help-
ful to the LSSP was that the organised working
class lost faith in the promises of Bandaranaike
and moved into strike action to win theit
wage demands.

But the LSSP, as before, acted only em-
pirically. In a tail-endist fashion, the LSSP
supported the working-class strikes and
adopted only a more critical attitude to
Bandaranaike.

Although the LSSP correctly noted that the
Bandaranaike government (MEP) was bona-
partist in character, it failed to draw the con-
clusion that mass illusions in such a
government cannot easily disappear, that the
LSSP had to launch consistent struggle on
many fronts on reformism and Stalinism to
win the masses away from "Bandaranaike
politics." On the other hand, the LSSP naively
believed that, with the assassination of Ban-
daranaike, "Bandaranaike politics" had come
to an end. The LSSP even believed that the road
was now open for the party to ride to par-
liamentary power.

It was thus that the LSSP decided to throw
all its forces in the 1960 elections (March)
with the aim of winning a majority to form an
LSSP government in parliament. And the Inter-
national Secretariat, the Mandels and the
Pierre Franks, looked on approvingly with
hope that the LSSP would win a majority in
this election.

But the SLFP, led by the widow of Bandara-
naike, came out of the elections (March 1960),
as the party with the largest number of seats,
although it failed to win an overall majority
to form the government. The LSSP was reduced
from 12 to 10 seats and was thrown into a
state of confusion.

But this outcome of the elections might well
have been the opportunity for the party to
review its election policy which contributed
in a large way to increasing mass illusions
in parliament and also to disorienting the party
membership. In fact the decision of the party
to bid for a parliamentary majority was
evidence that the party had lost all revolu-
tionary perspective and had accepted the
reformist and Stalinist parliamentary or so-
called peaceful road to socialism.

Nor did , the Mandels and Pierre Franks of
the International Secretariat intervene cor-
rectly even after the event, in this regard. The
leaders of the I.S. could not realise that what
was involved here was the disease of parlia-
mentarism and reformism that had got a
stranglehold on the party, and not a question of
miscalculation or wrong evaluation. Here is a
sample bf their orientation in this regard—

"The starting point must be a frank self
criticism of the errors in analysis and eval-
uation committed by the party prior to the 20th
March elections, namely—
(a) It thought that the objective situation was

WINTER 1973-74

11

favourable to the victory of the revolutionary
movement;

(b) It supposed that the masses have already had
enough e;q}erience with the SLFP and that as a
result they might in their majority turn towards
the LSSP."

(I.S. Document on Ceylon, October 1960)
In this context, it was no surprise that the
leadership of the LSSP, which was now steeped
in parliamentarism continued to look desper-
ately for solutions within the sameparliamen-
tarist perspective. And it was thus that the next
step was taken by the right-wing leader N.M.
Perera who challenged all the basic positions
of Trotskyism, pronounced that the proletariat
in Ceylon was petty -bourgeois in outlook, that
revolutionary mass struggle leading to the
dictatorship of the proletariat was impossible
and crudely proposed that the LSSP enter a
coalition front with the SLFP "on an agreed
program."

And as for the "brilliant Marxists" like
Mandel, the Colvins and the Leslies, they were
only a step behind N.M. Perera. In fact, it was
Leslie Gunawardena that sought to give
theoretical justification for the betrayal that
Perera found no difficulty in proposing in
the manner of the Social Democrats. Leslie
Gunawardena, you see, was, in keeping with
the traditions of the Trotskyist movement,
against the popular front! But according to Les-
lie Gunawardena a popular front with an anti-
capitalist program was in accordance with the
program of Trotskyism! Thus Leslie Guna-
wardena was opposed to N.M. Perera's pro-
posal to form a coalition government on an
agreed minimum program. "This action" wrote
Leslie "was light-minded and unworthy of a
party that claims to employ the Marxist
method"!

Four years later, in June 1964, these same
■brilliant Marxists" led by this same Leslie
had moved far and away from Leslie's own
theory of 1960. They were opposed to the pro-
posal of N.M. Perera not on the absence of an
anti-capitalist program. Their difference with
N.M. Perera was that they wanted a coalition
government between the entire ULFM-LSSP-
MEP, CP and the SLFP— They wanted a com-
plete and proper popular front!

Opposition

Though late, left oppositional elements
in the LSSP began to intervene. In 1957,

14 The United Left Front (ULF) was an elec-
toral bloc in the 1963 elections of the LSSP,
the Communist Party and Philip Gunawardena's
MEP on ajointprogramof minimal reforms.

one year after Bandaranaike assumed office,
the opposition to the policy of "responsive
co-operation" manifested itself through a small
group in the Central Committee. In its amend-
ment to the political resolution of the Central
Committee, this group (W. Dharmasena, Robert
Gunawardena, Edmund [Samarakkody], Chan-
dra Gunasekera) stated—

"When the MEP government came into pow-
er the masses were intoxicated with illusions
regarding this government. Large sections
of the masses close to the party expected
the party to support the MEP government.
In this situation, partly due to lack of clar-
ity (of the party) regarding the MEP govern-
ment, the party offered co-operation (res-
ponsive) to the government whilst directing
the parliamentary group to sit in the opposi-
tion. As the party failed to characterise
the MEP government as a capitalist govern-
ment, the fact that the parliamentary group
sat in the opposition did not signalise its
fundamental opposition or of being against
the government. Whatever was the intention
of the party, in the eyes of the masses,
the key to the understanding of the fundamen-
tal position of the party in relation to the
government was the offer of co-operation
(responsive) by the party. This offer of
co-operation to the capitalist government was
wrong. The party could have and should have
offered support to the progressive measures
of the government while stating categorically
that the MEP government was a capitalist
government. However, unpalatable and unac-
ceptable it may have been to the masses,
the party should have characterised this gov-
ernment as a capitalist government and there-
after proceeded to explain." (Amendment of
Edmund-Robert group in the CC, 1957).

In the further efforts to combat parliamen-
tarism and to take the party along the path
of mass struggle the group insisted that "the
aim of the party in relation to the MEP
government is revolutionary overthrow of
the government, i.e. by the method of the
mass uprising. The masses are not ready
now (today) for the overthrow of the govern-
ment. But in view of the failure of the
government to solve the pressing problems
of the people, in view of the ever increasing
dissension in the MEP, and the demoralisa-
tion of its own ranks, in view of the growing
militancy of the working class, the situation
can change very rapidly, and at any moment
from now, the masses could well raise the
slogan 'Down with the MEP government.'
As a bridge between their present conscious-
ness and the stage when they will be ready
for the call for the overthrow of the Govern-

(continued next page)

12

SPARTACIST

. . . Ceylon

ment, the party will adopt as a central agi-
tational slogan 'We do not want the capitalist
MEP government, we want a workers and
peasants government'."

Undoubtedly this group failed to come to
grips with the roots of reformism in the
party. It only focused attention on some
aspects of party policy. Nevertheless, the
orientation of this group gave promise of
possibilities for the growth of a real rev-
olutionary tendency.

It was thus an opportune moment for the
leaders of the loS, to intervene on the side
of the left oppositional elements that were
definitively emerging. But there was no such
intervention, for the reason that these lead-
ers, the Mandels and the Pierre Franks, had
no differences with the LSSP leadership in
regard to their policy of "responsive co-
operation" to the Bandaranaike government.

It was only when the LSSP leaders took
the inevitable step from "responsive co-
operation" to the call for support of an
SLFP government that the leaders of the
International Secretariat intervened with a
document to register their opposition.

The leaders of the I.S. were in a dilemma.
If the LSSP was right when it offered co-
operation (responsive co-operation) to the
first Bandaranaike government (MEP) how
could the LSSP be wrong when it called for
and supported the formation of an SLFP
government in parliament?

The answer to this question is that the
LSSP was completely wrong in offering co-
operation (responsive) to the bourgeois MEP
government of Bandaranaike in 1956. The
LSSP was once again wrong in calling for
support of the bourgeois SLFP in 1960.

But the leaders of the I.S. were not pre-
pared to admit that it was their failure that
they did not state categorically that the policy
of "responsive co-operation" was wrong. It
was thus that the Mandels and Pierre Franks
found themselves on the defensive before
the LSSP reformists in their attempt to ex-
plain what they really meant by "critical
support" to the SLFP government. These
leaders of the I.S. were guilty of a serious
distortion of the Leninist-Trotskyist position
in regard to the governments of the so-
called national progressive bourgeoisie.' And
here is their orientation in that regard—
"We do not forget that, in the case of col-
onial and semi-colonial countries, the revol-

utionary party can give its critical support
to governments with a non^-proletarian lead-
ership, be they petty-bourgeois or bourgeois"!
[our emphasis-E.S.](Document of the LS. on
Ceylon),

However, in the same breath, the document
continued, "The support of a revolutionary
party for a bourgeois or petty -bourgeois
government cannot be other than critical,
namely strictly conditional and limited. That
means in practise that this support can be
granted for progressive, effectively anti-capi-
talist or anti-imperialist measures, either
planned or carried out, measures that must
be defended against any maneouvre or sabo-
tage by the reactionary forces." But why
this equivocation? A revolutionary Marxist
party will not and cannot give even critical
support to any bourgeois or petty -bourgeois
government. If the Mandels and the Pierre
Franks mean thereby critical support to only
"progressive and anti- capitalist and anti-
imperialist measures" then how do they talk
of "giving critical support to governments
with a non-proletarian leadership, be they
petty-bourgeois or bourgeois"? They knew
that what was involved here was the attitude
of the revolutionary party to a bourgeois
government in a colonial or semi-colonial
country, and not to its attitude to certain
measures of such a government. They know
well that a revolutionary Marxist party could
well give critical support to certain measures
of bourgeois governments, even of military
governments. But the attitude of a revolu-
tionary Marxist party to a bourgeois govern-
ment with even a "progressive" coloration
can be nothing but irreconcilable opposition,
although the manner of opposition to such a
government will depend on the mass senti-
ment in relation to the government.

It is thus that support to a government,
whether disguised as "responsive co-opera-
tion" or critical support, must be rejected
as being in direct conflict with the funda-
mental programmatic position of the party.

But whatever were the weaknesses and
equivocations of the International Secretariat,
the reformist leadership of the LSSP had
by their unequivocal call for support of an
SLFP government in May 1960 exposed the
hollowness of their claims to be a Trotsky-
ist party. This meant that the task of rev-
olutionary Marxists within the LSSP was to
begin the struggle for a Trotskyist program
and the organisation of a revolutionary ten-
dency with or without the support of the
International Secretariat.

v.

WINTER 1973-74

13

However, the left oppositionists in the
LSSP allowed themselves to be disarmed
when the LSSP leadership empirically put
on an oppositional stance in relation to the
SLFP government, especially when sectors
of the working class moved into strike ac-
tion under the leadership of the LSSP. And,
for its part, the International Secretariat
even believed that an appeal to the party
leadership from the World Congress would
sxiffice to make these, now confirmed re-
formists, take a revolutionary road!

"The World Congress appeals to the Lan-
ka Sama Samaja Party for a radical change
in the political course in the direction in-
dicated by the document of the leadership
of the International."

"The Congress is confident that the next
National Conference of the LSSP in whose
political preparation the whole International
must participate, will know how to adopt
all the political and organisational decisions
necessary to overcome the crisis which was
revealed following on the results of the March
1960 election campaign." (Letter of 6th World
Congress to LSSP)

Far from any effective participation of the
International or any participation at all by
the I,S. in any national conference of the
LSSP "for a radical change in its political
course," the Mandels and Pi6rre Franks
were once again traversing the same par-
liamentarist road with the LSSP leadership,
just when the working class had achieved,
as never before, unity for struggle around
21 demands which could well develop into
political struggle against the SLFP govern-
ment and the capitalist class.

United Left Front

The Marxist tactic of the united front
with Stalinist and reformist working-class
parties and even bourgeois parties means
nothing more than unity in action in concrete
anti- imperialist or class-struggle situations.
It can never mean a political alliance with
such parties, which cannot have any other
objective than the winning of reforms from
the capitalists or the capitalist government.

The problem of the alternative govern-
ment, alternative to the bourgeois govern-
ment, is often posed before the revolution-
ary Marxists. But this question of an al-
ternative government is linked to the dynam-
ics of the revolution.

This means that revolutionary Marxists
do not project a transitional reformist gov-
ernment prior to a workers government. But

this was precisely the orientation of the LSSP
leaders who in their search for an alterna-
tive to a bourgeois government, proposed a
government of the so-called "United Left
Front" composed of the two working-class-
based parties--the LSSP and CP--and the
petty-bourgeois MEP (Philip Gunawardena)
on an agreed program (July 1963).

The concluding paragraph of the preamble
to this agreement, containing a "General
Program" (maximum) and an immediate pro-
gram, revealed the reformist and Stalinist
character of this "Front",

"In accordance with the needs of this
situation and in response to this mass urge,
the Ceylon Communist Party, the Lanka Sama
Samaja Party and the Mahajana Eksath Per-
amuna have agreed to form a United Left
Front in order to mobilise and lead all
anti -imperialist, anti -feudal and socialist for-
ces in Ceylon in the fight to establish a gov-
ernment that will give effect to the following
general program."

The "immediate" or the minimum part
of this program, which was the real pro-
gram of the Front, speaks for itself. The
following are among the demands of the
"immediate" or minimum program: (a) Bring
down PricesI Let the State import and
undertake the wholesale trade in all essen-
tial commodities, (b) End the wage freeze.'
Political and trade union rights for teachers
and other employees of the Government....
(c) Participation of workers in each work
place in the management of state and nation-
alised undertakings, (d) Nationalise the 13
Foreign Banksl

Revolutionary Tendency

The minority in the Central Committee (14
members), that had for some time been mov-
ing in a revolutionary orientation, were cate-
gorically opposed to the so-called United Left
Front.

The minority (which included Meryl [Fer-
nando], Edmund [Samarakkody], Karlo [Karala-
singham], [Bala] Tampoe, D.S. Mallawaratchi,
S.A. Martinus, W. Dharmasena) was quick to
see the reformist nature of this ULF which it
correctly characterised as popular frontis ml
"The situation which now faces the party is one
in which it is clear that the MEP and the CP
are not contemplating the t3rpe of United Front
activity that will in fact provide a united left
lead to the masses against the SLFP govern-
ment and the forces of capitalist reaction.

(continued next page)

14

SPARTACIST

. . . Ceylon

These two parties are seeking instead, to se-
cure the party's consent to putting forward an
agreed governmental program before the
masses in the name of the United Left Front
for the purpose of canvassing support for the
establishment of a popular front type of govern-
ment in parliament. This parliamentary re-
formist perspective for united front activity
must be rejected by the party....

. . . The party must avoid any course of action
which is likely to strengthen the illusions al-
ready created amoi^st the left minded masses
that the road forward to socialism in Ceylon
lies through the setting up of a United Left
Front with the objective of establishing a coa-
lition government in parliament, on the basis of
any agreed program for that purpose."

(Resolution of the CC minority)

With the emergence of a revolutionary ten-
dency led by 14 members of the Central Com-
mittee, the time was opportune to begin in an
organised manner the struggle against parlia-
mentarism and reformism and for orienting
the party in a revolutionary direction. And this
was clearly the moment for the International
Secretariat to come down decisively on the side
of the CC minority, for a joint struggle for the
building of the revolutionary party.

It was thus that the CC minority looked for-
ward hopefully for support from the Mandels
and the Pierre Franks, especially when the
International Secretariat had once again, in the
fall of 1961, reminded the LSSP leaders that it
was urgent for the party to be re -oriented on
the lines suggested by the I.S. and endorsed by
the Sixth World Congress. By its August (1961)
resolution on Ceylon, the I.S, reiterated the
following matters.

(a) "The impossibility of the conquest of
power by the parliamentary way and the neces-
sity for never forgetting that the smashing of
the bourgeois apparatus and the creation by the
masses in the course of a revolutionary process
as a whole, of new organs of power, remain
the condition for the victory of the proletariat
and its revolutionary party";

(b) "The necessity of working to make pos-
sible a close alliance between the worker mass-
es and the peasants and more particularly for
the operation of the real junction with the Indian
agricultural workers, who remain one of the
motive forces of the revolution in Ceylon; the
necessity to underline the principled attitude
favourable to trade union unity."

(c) The International Secretariat even re-
minded the LSSP leadership that "up till now,

the conference of the LSSP, which should have
discussed all these questions, has not been con-
voked and there is consequently no official
stand of the party."

All this and the initial reactions of the Inter-
national Secretariat to the parliamentarism
that was reflected through the first draft of the
ULF agreement gave promise of principled po-
sitions in this regard by the Mandels and the
Pierre Franks, especially in the context of the
categorical opposition of the CC minority (14
members out of 44)*

But it was just when the CC minority looked
to cooperation from the Mandels and Pierre
Franks to continue their struggle against the
LSSP reformists that they were abandoned by
these leaders who took the side of the N.M.
Pereras and Leslies when the latter signed the
so-called agreement of the United Left Front
which was nothing but a modest programme of
reforms to fight the next parliamentary elec-
tions in the perspective of forming a joint
government in parliament. The I.S. issued a
public statement hailing the formation of the
LSSP-MEP-CP "Left United Front."

Was the International Secretariat correct in
supporting the United Left Front formed in
August 1963? What was their justification in
this regard? Were they acting in accordance
with the general program of Trotskyism?

Workers and Peasants Government

The call of the Bolsheviks in 191 7 for a gov-
ernment of the Socialist Revolutionaries and
Mensheviks and their readiness to designate
such a government as a workers and peasants
government has been the excuse for revision-
ists of the United Secretariat and oftheHealy-
ite variety to call for support of governments
of reformist working-class parties and petty-
bourgeois parties, which are nothing but
governments for bourgeois reform. And this
was precisely the orientation of the Mandels
and the Pierre Franks, especially since the
3rd Congress (1951).

Here is for example the section of the
resolution of the 3rd Congress in regard to the
tactics concretely proposed for Chile:

"It [oifr section] will develop its propa-
ganda for the slogan of the workers and peas-
ants government which will eventually be con-
cretised in this country as a government of
parties claiming to represent the working
class, notably the Communist Party and the
Socialist Party." (This meant that the coali-
tion government of Allende that was recently
overthrown by the military coup was the con-

WINTER 1973-74

15

cretisation of the slogan workers andpeasants
government!)

And this was specifically the advice of the
I.S. to the LSSP when these leaders intervened
with the party in 1960 against their proposal
to support an SLFP government in that year.

"It would be rather dangerous, however for the
workers parties to restrict themselves to the
framework of the parliamentary aims and not
look for a new, effective contact with the mass-
es, through vigorous, extra-parliamentary
activity among the worker and peasant masses;
and at an electoral policy which puts forward
a radical program to be realised by the
United Front of the parties which claim to be
working class." [our emphasis— E.S.]

(I.S, Document on Ceylon, 18 May 1960)

But it is precisely against this reformist
interpretation of the Bolshevik experience that
Trotsky himself had warned.

Trotsky mentions the specific conditions
under which the Bolsheviks put forward the slo-
gan to the S.R.'s and the Mensheviks— "break
with the bourgeoisie and take power." Here are
these specific conditions:

1. It was a slogan put forward during a
particular phase in the pre-revolutionary sit-
uation of 1917— the period from April to Sep-
tember 1917.

2. In this context "the Bolshevik party
promised the Mensheviks and the S.R.'s, as the
petty-bourgeois representatives of the workers
and peasants, its revolutionary aid against the
bourgeoisie . . » "

3. The Bolshevik party categorically re-
fused either to enter the government of the
Mensheviks and the S.R.'s or to carry political
responsibility for it.

4. In the specific context in which this slo-
gan was projected "If the Mensheviks and the
S.R.'s had actually broken with the Cadets (lib-
erals) and with foreign imperialism, then 'the
workers' and peasants' government' created
by them could only have hastened and facilitated
the establishment of the dictatorship of the
proletariat. "'15

The Transitional Programme (of the 4th
International) left no room for any misunder-
standing in regard to this slogan— "This for-
mula, 'Workers and Peasants Government,'
first appeared in the agitation of the Bolsheviks
in 1917 and was definitely accepted after the
October Insurrection. In the final instance it
represented nothing more than the popular

15 L.D. Trotsky, "The Death Agony of Capitalism
and the Tasks of the Fourth International
(The Transitional Program)," 1938.

designation for the already established dicta-
torship of the proletariat.

"... The slogan 'Workers and Farmers
Government' is thus acceptable to us only in
the sense that it had in 1917 with the Bolshe-
viks—i.e., as an anti-bourgeois and anti-
capitalist slogan, but in no case in that demo-
cratic sense which later the epigones gave it,
transforming it from a bridge to socialist rev-
olution into the chief barrier upon its path."

The International Secretariat was com-
pletely wrong in regard to the so-called tactics
of forming governments of working-class based
parties and other petty -bourgeois parties which
they proposed for the backward countries in
1951 (3rd Congress) and specifically to the
LSSP in 1960 and when they gave their sanc-
tion to the United Left Front in August 1963.
And it is this wrong policy that the U.Sec. as
well as the Healyites continue to follow up to
the present.

The Coalition Government

From the United Left Front (LSSP-MEP-
CP Coalition) to an SLFP-LSSP coalition was
but a step. And this happened in June 1964. Of
course the Mandels and the Pierre Franks were
frantically wringing their hands when N.M.
Perera took the lead to make this proposal.
And this time "Barkis was willing." The bour-
geois SLFP government was in crisis and con-
ditions were maturing for massive working-
class action against the government at a time
when its ranks were depleting. Sirima Ban-
daranaike needed a coalition with the strongest
working=class based party. The SLFP leader
readily agreed to form a coalition government
with the LSSP which was ready to betray the
working class and the toilers.

The revolutionary tendency categorically
opposed coalition and denounced it as betrayal.
However, even at this eleventh hour, the I.S.
failed to establish direct contact with the revo-
lutionary tendency led by the CC opposition of
14 members to jointly fight the reformists in
this struggle. Instead, the I.S. sent a letter to
the Secretary, Leslie Gunawardena, the con-
tents of which were known to the minority and
the party only on the day of the National Con-
ference to decide on coalition.

Nor did the arrival of Pierre Frank, the
U.Sec. representative, one day before the Con-
ference, give any added strength to the revolu-
tionary tendency that had through its own ef-
forts organised for the final confrontation. And
what is more, when the revolutionary tendency
informed Pierre Frank that the coalitionists
(continued next page)

16

SPARTACIST

Ceylon

were certain to win at conference and that the
only course of action that appeared to the mi-
nority as correct was the split from the coali-
tionists on this issue, the representative of the
loSo had no views to offer. His only words were
—"that is for you to decide!" Thus, contrary to
the claims of the LS., its representative would
not even associate himself with the decision of
the revolutionary tendency to break with NoM.
Perera, Colvin [Ro de Silva] and Leslie [Guna-
wardena] when they took the road of open be-
trayal and when they struck a frontal blow at
the World Trotskyist movement. Of course,
later, the LS. expelled the coalitionists from
the International and recognised the LSSP(R)
as its Ceylon sectioho

LSSP(R)

The task before the LSSP(R) was to draw up
a full balance sheet of the whole of the LSSP
experience and on the basis of these lessons
to begin the building of the revolutionary party.

But, from the outset, the contradictions
within itself made it impossible for the LSSP(R)
to undertake any systematic efforts at party
building. And the truth about the opposition that
split from the LSSP in June 1964 was that there
were four groups.

Karalasingham Group

A basic contradiction in the LSSP(R) arose
from the Karalasingham group.

Within the left opposition in the LSSP prior
to the split Karalasingham gave promise of
playing an important role in the struggle against
revisionism and for the building of the revolu-
tionary party. Karalasingham intervened
sharply against the coalition line of the LSSP
leaders. In his pamphlet for the special con-
ference, which later he included in his book on
"Coalition Politics," Karalasingham effective-
ly exposed the revisionism of the LSSP leaders
especially by reference to Marxist theory and
experience

Significantly, however, from the outset
Karalasingham stood categorically opposed to
a split of the left oppositionists in the event of
the acceptance of coalition by the party at
special conference. Karalasingham did not
clarify his perspectives for remaining within
the LSSP in such a situation. And, on the other
hand, he was vehemently opposed to any attempt
to even form a faction when this was mooted

about by some of those in left-opposition long
before the proposal of coalition was made by
the N.Mo Perera group. And undoubtedly, the
failure to organize a faction by the revolution-
ary tendency on a platform, which would have
brought out clearly the differences among the
oppositionists, was the most serious mistake
of those who sought to fight the revisionism of
the LSSP leaders. *

Despite his orientation in this regard, Kara-
lasingham, though reluctantly, joined the left-
oppositionists who organised themselves as the
LSSP(R). Karalasingham did not reveal his
perspectives in regard to his decision to be in
the LSSP(R)o

But it was not long before Karalasingham's
motivation became manifest. In December 1964
the two party (LSSP-R) M.P.'s made a tactical
mistake on the issue of the voting on the Throne
Speech of the Coalition government. ^"^ Voting
against the government on this issue was not
the mistake. The LSSP(R) CC had rightly taken
a decision to vote against the Throne Speech.
Their mistake was that they voted on the mo-
tion of the Independent (rightist) Member
Dahanayake. As a result, the party was exposed
to the attacks of the coalitionists, who alleged
that the LSSP(R) M.P.'s joined the UNP and
the rightists to defeat the government. That
was the gravamen of the charge that could
justifiably be leveled against them.

However, Karalasingham. took the opportun-
ity to launch an attack, not on the tactical ques-
tion but on the question of the principal position
of the party, that is the opposition to coalition
politics. Without specifically stating so, Kara-
lasingham developed his attack on the inde-
pendent existence of the LSSP(R). His first
move was to call for the defeat of the UNP in
the election that was due (March 1965). He
further proposed that the party call for support
of Sirima Bandaranaike, SLFP leader, in her
constituency. The next step was the organisa-
tion of a pro-coalitionist faction— the "Sakthi
group"— which published a paper, which in
direct opposition to the party line called for
support publicly for a SLFP -LSSP government,
to replace the UNP government that was elected
in the March 1965 elections.

With the Healy group also supporting the
Karalasingham-led "Sakthi" group, it was no

16 The Throne Speech, given by the prime min-
ister, presents the government program at the
beginning of a parliamentary term. The vote
cast by a party on the Throne Speech is an
important indication of that party's attitude
toward the government.

WINTER 1973-74

17

easy task for the revolutionary tendency to
fight successfully these revisionists, especial-
ly in the context of the U.Sec.'s calling for
tolerance for this group. Mandel disagreed with
the Provisional Committee of the LSSP(R) when
it expelled two of the Karalasingham coalition-
ists who were responsible for the "Sakthi"
paper and were not ready to admit that they had
violated party discipline.

That Karalasingham's perspective when he
participated in the organisation of the LSSP(R)
was none other than the betrayal of the left-
oppositionists to the LSSP coalitionists re-
ceived confirmation in his virtual confessions
in the introduction to his book "Senile Left-
ism—A reply to Edmund Samarakkody," which
he produced as a passport to enter his "paren-
tal" party, the reformist LSSP. In a denuncia-
tion of the leaders of the LSSP(R) for their
decision to split from the reformists, Karala-
singham contended that "without reference to
the process that was in motion within the LSSP,
without regard to the consciousness and think-
ing of the advanced elements in the mass move-
ment behind the LSSP and ignoring the deep
divisions in their own ranks between the United
Secretariat and the Healy caucus, they arbi-
trarily proclaimed themselves a new party."
Thus Karalasingham's motivation for being one
of the mid-wives of the "new party," was to
strangle it at its birth'

While Karalasingham sought to say that the
split in 1964 was too premature and that he had
a perspective of fighting the coalitionists from
within, his real orientation was revealed in the
very next paragraph: "The political tendency
to which the writer belongs has decided to re-
join the parent organisation." So it was a case

THE TIMES OF CEYLON

Philip Gunawardena, S.A. Wickremasingfie
(CP) and N„M. Perera in 1963.

of the prodigal son returning to the parental
home not to continue his feud with the parents
but to ask their forgiveness for his own past
sins and to remain a loyal member of the
parental home.'

Nor did Karalasingham fail to give the "mis-
guided" or "senile leftists" of the LSSP(R) the
benefit of his superior understanding of
Leninism-Trotskyism: "Equally importantpo-
litical considerations have made this neces-
sary." He then quotes from the Sakthi which
he claimed as his factional paper . . .

"But between the regime of imperialism and the
compradore bourgeoisie which exists today and
the definite regime of the dictatorship of the
working-class, it is likely that there would be a
sequence of intermediate regimes initially re-
flecting the very backwardness, and subse-
quently in consequence of the growing political
maturity of the masses, representative of the
more advanced elements , Whatever be the man-
ner of the down fall of the UNP government,
so long as it is the result of the new mass up-
rising, it can be stated that its successor would
be the government of the SLFP-LSSP coalition.
The untimely defeat of the coalition, and that
too at the hands of the class enemy of the
working-class, has placed a coalition govern-
ment of this type on the order of the day.
"But genuine revolutionaries, far from being
dismayed by such a development— viz: that a
SLFP-LSSP coalition should replace the UNP's
national government, would do everything to
facilitate its formation. ..."

"Therefore," concluded Karalasingham, "the
place of all serious revolutionaries today is in
the LSSP, so that in participating fully in the
task ahead they could intervene energetically,
when the inevitable class differentiation of the
mass movement takes place,"

Karalasingham thus unmasked himself. This
is nothing else than the Stalinist "two-stage
theory" with the projection of the transitional
regimes of coalition with the so-called national
or liberal bourgeoisie. With the tradition of
LSSP opposition to this so-called theory of the
Stalinists, the N.Mo's [Perera] and the Leslies
[Gunawardena] and now Karalasingham could
not give this designation to their "theory" and
acknowledge Joseph Stalin as their "Marxist"
mentoro But in any event now, the hoUowness
of Karalasingham's claims to Marxist theory,
his audacity in invoking the authority of Lenin
and Trotsky in his attempt to mask his reform-
ism and his unbreakable links with coalition
politics and revisionism, stood exposed.

But even this complete unmasking of him-
self by Karalasingham did not prevent the
Mandels and Franks from inviting him to par-
(continued next page)

18

SPARTACIST

. . . Ceylon

ticipate in the 9th World Congress in 1968,
several months after he had been re -admitted
to the reformist LSSPl

Tampoe Group

The CMU^'' leader Tampoe showed no in-
terest in the buildingof a revolutionary leader-
ship c His main preoccupation was the building
of himself as atrade-union leader whilst talking
"revolution." What Tampoe wanted was to use
the LSSP(R) to give himself a coloration as a
revolutionary trade-union leader. And in his
trade union he was the boss who maintained
excellent relations with the employers, mainly
the imperialist agency houses, while staging
"token strikes" with the usual demonstrations
and public meetings, at which Tampoe was in-
variably the only speaker.

Trotskyists in Ceylon could not hope to take
even the first steps in the task of building the
revolutionary leadership without, among other
matters, effecting a sharp break with the trade -
union reformist politics which was a heritage
from the LSSP. In fact Tampoe's break with the
LSSP was to free himself for closer relations
with the employers and with all bourgeois gov-
ernments including the UNP for concessions for
workers in the CMU.

And it was Tampoe's rightist trade-union
politics that led him to oppose, in the Provision-
al Committee of the LSSP(R), the proposal to
develop the struggle against the UNP govern-
ment on the concrete issues of the declaration
of state of emergency (1966) and the police
shooting, the victimization of workers for the
strike (communal) led by the coalitionists, the
cut in the rice ration in the latter part of the
year followed by the devaluation of the rupee at
the dictates of the IMF.

Tampoe even supported the declaration of
the state of emergency (January 1966) in a
letter he sent to Prime Minister Dudley Senana-
yake. Tampoe opposed joint (united-front) ac-
tion with other trade unions against the UNP

17 The Ceylon Mercantile Union (CMU) is a
medium-sized union of government employees,
■white collar workers and miscellaneous other
office employees. Led by Bala Tampoe of the
LSSP(R), it was one of the few important
unions standing outside the federations led by
the by- now thoroughly reformist LSSP and pro-
Moscow and pro- Peking Stalinists.

government on the issue of the victimization
of the workers after the January 8 (1966)
strike.

However, the Tampoe group maintained
friendly relations with both the Karlo [Karala-
singham] coalitionist group and with the Healy-
ites, Healy's special envoy, Mike Banda, paid
several visits to Ceylon in his attempt to win
over Tampoe to Healy. The SLL press gave
Tampoe headline publicity for his two-hour
token strikes which he called out on chosen
occasions.

The break away of Karlo coalitionists
from the LSSP(R) found the revolutionary
tendency (Meryl [Fernando], D.S. Mallawar-
atchi, [Tulsiri] Andrade, Edmund [Samarak-
kody]) opposed by the Tampoe- Healy ite alli-
ance. Their common objective was to oust the
revolutionary tendency from its position of
leadership within the LSSP(R). And with regard
to the Healyites, disruption of the LSSP(R) and
not the building of a revolutionary party, was
their chief preoccupation.

Despite the efforts of the unprincipled
Tampoe -Healy ite combination to disrupt the
LSSP(R) there was a real possibility for the
revolutionary tendency to win against these
opportunists and rightists, but for the part
played by Mandel and the leaders of the United
Secretariat.

As previously, Mandel followed his policy of
conciliationism, at first with the Karlo coali-
tionists, and thereafter with the rightist trade -
union leader Tampoe whose 30,000 strong CMU
and token strikes and demonstrations could
provide occasional headline news of "Trotsky-
ist militant struggles in Ceylon" in the journals
of the United Secretariat.

It was thus that Mandel and the leaders of the
United Secretariat closedtheir eyes to the poli-
tics of the split in 1968 of the RSP (now RWP) i8
from the Tampoe-led LSSP(R) and adopted the
Tampoe group as the Ceylon section of the
United Secretariat, despite the fact that a com-
mission appointed at the open sessions of the
9th World Congress unanimously condemned
the politics of Tampoe .i9 Here are some rele-
vant extracts of this report:

"The Commission felt that some of the actions

18 The Revolutionary Samasamaja Party (RSP),
which at a convention in late 1972 changed its
name to the Revolutionary Workers Party
(RWP).

19 For further information on the attempted
cover-up of the Tampoe scandal by the U.Sec.
see "The Case of Bala Tampoe" in Spartacist
No. 21, Fall 1972.

WINTER 1973-74

19

and policies of Com. Bala [Tampoe] and the
LSSP{R) brought toour notice by Com. Edmund,
and not denied by Com. Bala, could have ser-
iously damaged the reputation of Com. Bala as
a revolutionary leader, compromised the
Fourth International in Ceylon and have been
exploited by all the enem'ies of our
movement. . . .

"The evidence placed before the Commission
tends to support the conclusion that the poli-
cies followed by Com. Bala, especially in his
dual role as CMU Secretary and as LSSP(R)
Secretary were gravely compromising to the
4th International. The Commission was not in a
position to get a clear enough picture of the
policies of Com. Bala in the concrete circum-
stances of Ceylon and the LSSP(R) to propose
that this section be disaffiliated by the World
Congress. But we strongly feel the need for the
further investigation of this matter."

Despite this devastating condemnation of
Tampoe and his politics unanimously by its own
Commission, the 9th World Congress, which
was manipulated throughout by the bureaucratic
leaders— the Mandels, Franks and theLivios—
accepted Tampoe's group as the Ceylon Section
and decided to file the report of the Ceylon
Commission' Incidentally, for alleged security
reasons, the leaders of the United Secretariat
decided to abruptly end the Conference allow-
ing only a half hour (I) to the discussion of the
Ceylon question.

It was clearly not possible for the Mandels,
Pierre Franks, the Livios and the Hansens to
reconcile their acceptanceof the Tampoe group
as their Ceylon section with their claim to be
Leninists -Trotskyists. And that is why they
vised one "Vitarne" as their tool to "dispose of"
the question by merely denying that there was
any Commission at all on the Ceylon question
at the 9th Congress. For, if there was no Com-
mission there could not be a report to talk
about! But it is relevant in this regard to ask
why the leadership of the U.Sec. (Mandel,
Pierre Frank, Livio and Hansen) allowed a per-
son who was not a member of the Fourth Inter-
national, a mere observer and an outsider, who

had been invited among several such persons to
this Congress, to report on the truth of what
took place at the 9th World Congress in regard
to the Ceylon question and the Tampoe group.
We are certain that this question will remain
unanswered by the leaders of the United
Secretariat.

Tampoe Group Since 1969

The orientation of the United Sec-
retariat as manifested in the documents
and decisions of the 9th Congress, and
Tampoe's real aims left no future for the
Tampoe group to develop as a viable political
formation whether linked to the right-
opportunist wing led by the Hansens and No-
vacks or the ultra -left opportunist wing led by
the Livios, Mandels and Franks of the U.Sec.

The question has been and remains— "who is
using whom?" Is it the case that the Mandel
wing of the U.Sec. is using Tampoe to further
their aims— i.e. to have a large trade union
in Ceylon, through whose boss Tampoe, to get
the United Secretariat an appearance of a strong
base, though in reality without substance; or is
it that Tampoe is using the Mandels, Franks
and Livios to further his own interests as a
trade-union boss-type leader?

The reality is that there is no political party
or even a group that functions independently as
the LSSP(R). The LSSP(R) has no political
activity to its credit ever since the RSP split
in 1969. It has long ago ceased to publish even
an occasional newspaper.

With the rise of the JVP^o youth movement
Tampoe, apparently with the approval of the
Mandels, sought to opportunistically associate
with Rohana Wijeweera^i and other leaders
who were visibly growing in popularity. In order
to win a place for himself at a time when this
movement did not give any indications of pre-
paring any confrontation with the coalition gov-
ernment, Tampoe rushed to befriend them in
the courts during the first days of police action

(continued next page)

20 The Janatha Vikmuthi Peramuna (JVP-Peo-
ples Liberation Front), a Guevarist organiza-
tion of student and peasant youth", led a large-
scale youth revolt in the Sinhalese rural
areas in the spring of 1971 which was directed
against the coalition government of the SLFP,
LSSP and CP (Moscow). In a remarkable
demonstration of counterrevolutionary soli-
darity, the government was aided by the U.S.,
Britain, the USSR, India, Pakistan and Egypt,
while China gave its explicit political endorse-
ment of the bloody repression of the uprising!

21 Wijeweera is a former member of the pro-

Moscow CP who had begun organizing the
JVP in 1966, building a large following among
university students and unemployed graduates.
His own politics were essentially "insurrec-
tionary Stalinism" of the Guevarist type. As
Comrade Sa ma rakkody noted in "Politics of De-
ceit," ". . .the JVP had completely discounted
the plantation workers (largely of Indian Tamil
origin) and that it did not have any position on
the burning question of the Tamil minority—
their language and other rights. . . .Sinhalese
chauvinism was clearly evident in their
politics,"

20

SPARTACIST

. . . Ceylon

against themo Tampoe even went so far as to
give a certificate to Wijeweera that he was no
communalist and that he was a true Marxist,
when he knew well that ex-Stalinist Rohana
Wijeweera was consciously seeking to win over
the Sinhalese petty bourgeois through his talk of
the need to fight so-called Indian expansionism.

However, when the police were hot on the
trails of the JVP, Tampoe judiciously moved
away from the JVP and took a vow of silence
during the period.. And when the murderous
campaign of the government against the youth
was on, during which thousands were killed by
shooting or torture, Tampoe had lost his voice.
While within the first week of this campaign
against the youth the RSP (now RWP) un-
equivocally condemned the actions of the gov-
ernment, demanded the end to kiflings and
torture, and also invited the trade unions in-
cluding the CMU to communicate their views in
this regard, Tampoe continued to remain
silent.

However, when it appeared quite safe,
Tampoe very late in the day appealed to
the Prime Minister that "it would be an
act of inhumanity for you to order a con-
certed military offensive by the armed
services against the insurgents," etc.

And, as it happens in periods of crisis, it
was not easy for Tampoe to indulge even in
tilting at wind=mills especially under emer-
gency conditions. It was thus that Tampoe did
not move a finger during the 100 -day strike
of the bank clerks, led by the Bank Employees
Union, whose leader was Oscar Perera, a
member of the LSSP(R). Tampoe failed to take
the initiative to get trade-union action in sup-
port of this strike. He only reluctantly partici-
pated in a joint trade-union meeting organised
on the initiative of the RSP (now RWP) leader
Tulsiri Andrade of the Central Bank Union.
He thereafter washed his hands of this strike
and silently watched this strike being smashed
by the coalition government supported espe-
cially by the LSSP.'

Healy Group

Having kept aloof from the politics of the
LSSP from the time of the 1953 split of the
International, the leader of the so-called In-
ternational Committee and of the SLL, Gerry
Healy, parachuted himself into the Ceylon scene
in June 1964. Having arrived in the same plane
with Pierre Frank a day before the LSSP con-

ference, Healy, who had a few followers in
the LSSP opposition, sought to gate-crash into
the conference hall of the LSSP. Of course, he
was not permitted to enter.

What Healy's politics were in relation to the
issues at the conference was unknown. Nor did
he seek to place his views before the LSSP
membership through documentation prior to the
conference. Instead, what he sought to do was
to take the left opposition into the fold of the
International Committee by disruption.

It was this same line of disruption that his
followers—Prins Rajasooriya (now with Tam-
poe), Sydney Wanasinghe (nowwiththe LSSP co-
alitionists), Wilfred Perera and R.S.Baghavan
pursued. It was thus that the Healy group gave
full co-operation to the Karlo coalitionists to
fight the revolutionary tendency. In fact, a
section of the Healy group actively participated
in the organisation of the Karlo faction, "the
Sakthi group, " which in their factional paper
publicly called for the support of a coalition
government.

Nor were the Healyites strange bed-fellows
with the Karlo coalitionists. While denouncing
the Mandels and the Franks for the betrayal
of the LSSP leaders, and while also denouncing
the [Edmund] Samarakkody-Meryl Fernartdo
group for advocating united-front action to in-
clude the coalition trade unions against the
victimisation by the UNP government, the local
Healyite "theoretician" Wilfred Perera was in
fact pursuing coalition politics.

Here is a sample of Wilfred Perera's theory
which he put out in 1967 during the UNP
regime.

"We should propose to the rank and file of the
left parties [referring to LSSP and CP] and of
the trade-unions under their control to bring
pressure on the Left party leaders to demand—

"1. a revision of the Joint Program [coali-
tion program] so as to include working-class
demands and socialist measures [I], and that
the demands should be formulated by a united
front of the trade-unions. And we should make
our own proposal regarding the demands;

"2. a more equitable apportionment of the
parliamentary seats for the next election, say
on a 50-50 basis as between the SLFP and the
left parties.

"The first demand will show how far Mrs.
Bandaranaike is prepared to go towards social-
ism, and at the same time expose the impotence
of the left fakers to push her leftwards. The
second will show how sincere Mrs. Bandaran-
aike is when she says she needs the co-
operation of the working-class to defeat the
UNP-led coalition."

Advocating coalition politics could not be more

'WINTER 1973-74

21

explicit than this'.

In this "theory" Wilfred Perera left the road
open to a link up with Tampoe whose syndical-
ism he correctly denounced in an earlier part
of the same document.

It was the contention of theHealy "theoreti-
cian" that they supported the resolution of the
Tampoe group (1967 Conference) as against the
Samarakkody group inorder to "save" the party
from the pro-coalition line of the latter! That
was Wilfred Perera's justification for support-
ing the syndicalism of Tampoe, which he ex-
plained as the meaning of his (Tampoe 's) line
of "unification of the working-class under its
own independent class banner": "We see here,"
wrote Wilfred Perera, "the illusions fostered
by a blind faith in trade -union militancy with-
out political perspectives and, a lack of under-
standing of the political issues involved."

But here is a sample of Wilfred Perera's
own syndicalism cum coalition politics in this
same document:

"The left fakers say they can achieve social-
ism by parliamentary means. Let them prove it
by breaking their ties with the SLFP which are
hindering them and make a bid for govern-
mental power on their own and on a working-
class program which the trade-unions will
jointly formulate. In place of the coalition pro-
gram we will propose a trade-union joint
program" [I],

Healy Group Since the Split

Having helped the Tampoe rightists to defeat
the revolutionary tendency at the 1968 (April)
Conference, which led to the split away of the
latter tendency and the formation of the RSP
(now RWP), the Healy group found its task in
the LSSP(R) was over. Without any explanation
for their conduct the Healyites led by Wilfred
Perera broke away from Tampoe, whom they
had helped to install as leader of the LSSP(R).

Claiming that the mantle of Trotskyism had
fallen on them, the Healyites announced their
separate organisation, the Revolutionary So-
cialist League,

From the outset however, the policies and
practice of this league were at variance and in
conflict with the program of Trotskyism. Whilst
their reputed leader Healy, of the so-called
International Committee, continues to rightly
castigate the Mandels and the Pierre Franks
for their responsibility for the LSSP debacle,
the RSL (the Ceylon Unit of this Healyite IC)
called for and supported the SLFP-LSSP-CP
coalition in the elections of May 1970, the out-
come of which was the present SLFP-led coali-
tion government.

The Healyites were thus consistent with
their policy within the LSSP(R), when they com-
pacted with the Karalasingham-led coalition-
ists, who in their factional paper "Sakthi"
called for supportof the SLFP-LSSP-CP coali-
tion. However, the RSL suddenly somersaulted.
About two months after the coalition govern-
ment was formed (May 1970), when sections of
the masses that supported these parties were
expressing their disappointment at the policies
of the government, the Healy group announced
that they had made a mistake when they sup-
ported the coalition at the elections.

The new line of the Healyites, which they
claimed was in accordance with Leninism-
Trotskyism, is their call to the LSSP and CP
to break away from the coalition and form a
government. Of course, they had with them
the history book of the Russian revolution.
Apparently, with confidence, they referred to
the Bolshevik experience in 1917, when in
the special conditions and in the context of a
revolutionary situation, Lenin called upon the
Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries to break
with the bourgeoisie and take the power.

But in the hands of the Healyites it was a
complete misapplication of the Bolshevik tac-
tic. The concretisation of the slogan "workers
and farmers government" through a govern-
ment of the LSSP and CP is a farcical concept
apart from the disorientation that such a slogan
rtiust lead to. There is no revolutionary or
pre -revolutionary situation in Ceylon. It is
not possible today to attempt a concretisation
of the slogan workers andpeasants government,
that is, to indicate which organisation of the
working class and toilers could constitute the
new power or government.

On the contrary, the consciousness of the
masses is at a stage when they are only ser-
iously dissatisfied and disappointed with the
coalition government. Of course sections of
these masses are moving into opposition
against the government without any perspec-
tives yet of any struggle against this govern-
ment. The working class, whose living stan-
dards are being systematically attacked by the
coalition government, has not yet launched any
large-scale trade-union action against the poli-
cies of this government. In fact, in the absence
of a revolutionary party, with influence among
the working class, it is possible that the masses
including sections of the working class could
well move in a rightist direction.

What is imperative today is to help the
working class and toilers to understand that
the blows struck against their living standards
(continued next page)

22

SPARTACIST

. • . Ceylon

are the result of the treacherous politics of
coalition— i.e. of the LSSP and CP betrayers.
Those claiming to be Trotskyists cannot con-
ceive of helping to create further illusions that
the way forward is a labour government of the
LSSP-CP which must necessarily be reformist
in character. But this is just what the Healyite
slogan does.

And, in regard to this slogan, it is necessary
once more to state what Trotsky himself cate-
gorically stated— "The slogan 'workers and
farmers government' is thus acceptable to us
only in the sense that it had in 1917 with the
Bolsheviks, i.e., as an anti-bourgeois and
anti-capitalist slogan, but in no case in that
'democratic' sense which later the epigones
gave it, transforming it from a bridge to so-
cialist revolution into the chief barrier upon
its path."

Struggle (or Trotskyism Today

Having participated in the left opposition
(1962) as consistent oppositionists to the coali-
tion and reformist politics of the LSSP leaders
who betrayed the party, having continued the
struggle against the Karalasingham coalition-
ists in the LSSP(R), having successfully faced
the combined opposition of the Healyites and
Tampoe, who was supported by the Pabloist
United Secretariat, the revolutionary tendency
that separated from these centrists, and which
re-grouped itself as the Revolutionary Sama-
samaja Party, is today reorganised as the
Revolutionary Workers Party.

During the first two years the revolutionary
tendency had the task of drawing up a proper
balance sheet of the experience of the LSSP
and the LSSP(R) and to cleanse itself of the
hangovers of Pabloism, which substituted em-
piricism and pragmatism for dialectical ma-
terialism and which abandoned the task of
building the revolutionary party to the partici-
pation and "integration" in the so-called living
movement of the masses, leading the Pabloites
to parliamentarism and syndicalism. The Rev-
olutionary Workers Party cannot but reject the
politics of both wings of the United Secretariat—
the ultra-left opportunist mixture of Mandel,
Livio, Frank, as well as the opportunist group
of Hansen-Novack.

While seeking to participate with its co-
thinkers in the unpostponable task of re-
grouping of the Trotskyists in other countries
in the perspective of contributing to the re-

building of the revolutionary International, the
Revolutionary Workers Party is bending its
energies to the construction of the Trotskyist
party in Ceylon on the firm foundations of the
Transitional Program of the Fourth Inter-
national and the relevant programmatic docu-
ments that remain the heritage of the Leninist-
Trotskyist movement.

Present Situation

Objective conditions today are more favour-
able than ever before for the development of
mass struggle for the overthrow of capitalist
class rule in Ceylon and for the establishment
,of socialism.

World capitalism has entered into a new
period of decline, reflected for a long time now
in economic recessions in advanced capitalist
countries, leading to fierce inter-imperialist
rivalry, which has driven the capitalist class
in each country to impose severe burdens on the
workers and the wage earners in these
countries.

For nearly a decade now the organised
working class in these advanced countries has
been engaged in wage struggles to defend their
living standards. The French working class
showed in their now famous struggle (1968) the
revolutionary potentialities of the proletariat in
these advanced capitalist countries.

An aspect of this new phase of decline of
capitalism on a world scale is that Ceylon and
other backward countries are more intensely
exploited by imperialism in numerous ways.
The economies in these countries, ruled in-
variably by the bonapartist "national" bour-
geois regimes, face deepening crises, mani-
fested by unbalanced budgets and serious lack
of foreign exchange to pay for necessary im-
ports, leading to increased burdens on the
workers and toilers. The masses in these
countries, despite the betrayals of the Stalin-
ists, reformists and centrists, must sooner or
later move on to the road of struggle.

Three years of the SLFP-LSSP-CP coali-
tion government have brought unprecedented
suffering to the working class and all the toil-
ers. While extending the state sector without
any real encroachment on the private capi-
talists, while appearing to strike blows at the
capitalists and imperialists, the government
is desperately seeking to maintain the profit
levels of these very same capitalists and im-
perialists, at the dictates of the IMF.

In this perspective, this government adopted
a policy of severe restriction of consumer im-
ports and has even totally banned the imports
of a large number of essential food imports,

WINTER 1973-74

23

which has led to serious inflation. Also, at the
dictates of the IMF, the government is imple-
menting a virtual wage freeze. And since the
April youth armed struggle, a state of emer-
gency continues and strikes are virtually
bannedo The repressive apparatus of the State
has been strengthened in an unprecedented
manner.

The reality today, especially with the newest
blows struck at the masses by further cuts in
rationed rice, flour and sugar, and also by
further increase of the price of these and
numerous other commodities, is that the gov-
ernment is facing increasing unpopularity. This
means, that from now on, sections of the mass-
es who supported and identified themselves with
the government will inevitably move away from
the coalition parties and the government. There
is now a real possibility of developing mass
opposition leading to mass action against the
measures of the government and the govern-
ment itself.

On the other hand, the rightist forces led
by the UNP are even now growing as a result
of the policies of the government, which have
in an unprecedented way impoverished the
masses and increased their misery.

Up to now the working class has been held
down from pressing their demands in the
perspective of trade-union action, principally
by the LSSP and CP— the partners in coalition,
on the pretext of the need for the workers to
sacrifice and produce more for "Socialism."

While "sacrifice" was the key note of the
LSSP propaganda, the CP (pro-Moscow) led
by the [S.A.] Wickremasinghe wing had adopted,
from the outset, more opportunistically, a
critical stance in relation to the policies of
the government which affected adversely the
living standards of the workers and toilers.

With the severity of the government's
measures against the masses, the CP(M) be-
came more "critical" and called upon the
government not to increase the burdens of the
masses, but instead, to strike at the imperial-
ists and to move on to more nationalisations.

The motivation of the CP(M), Wickrema-
singhe wing, was not to weaken the coalition
but to gather the coalition masses around it-
self as the most "progressive" and "dynamic"
force in the coalition. However, unexpectedly
for the Wickremasinghe -led CP, despite its

22 The International Confederation of Free Trade
Unions (ICFTU), formed in December 1949
under the sponsorship of U.S. American Fed-
eration of Labor leaders, was a CIA-backed
international center for a nti- communist un-
ions. The CIO immediately entered it, accept-

expressions of continued loyalty, the coalition
partners, SLFP and LSSP, in furtherance of the
rightward course of their government, have
shown them the door. This wing of the CP(M)
has been expelled from the coalition
government.

In response to the pressures of the rank
and file of their trade unions, the bureaucratic
leaders of the LSSP and the Keneuman wing of
the CP(M) have sought to give themselves the
appearance of being in readiness to lead the
workers in struggle to defend their living stand-
ards. They have recently presented through the
coalition trade union centre (JCTU) twenty-
eight (28) demands to the employers and their
own government.

The fraudulent nature of the moves of the
LSSP trade-union leaders as well as both wings
of the Stalinists (CP [Moscow]) already stands
exposed by their defense of the coalition gov-
ernment in regard to the latest measures (Oc-
tober 1st cuts in rationed rice, flour and sugar
with increase of prices). Far from seeking to
mobilise the workers for struggle, they are
vying with each other in calling upon the work-
ers for further sacrifices in a so-called na-
tional food crisis.

In the plantation sector the two largest trade
unions are the CWC (Ceylon Workers
Congress-led by Thondaman) and CDC (Ceylon
Democratic Congress-led by Aziz, allied to co-
alition). As an extreme right wing trade-union
leader, who has affiliation with the U.S.-
oriented IC FTU, 22 Thondaman ha s been threat-
ening to launch trade-union action to win the
monthly wage demand for the plantation work-
ers. However, Thondaman and some lesser un-
ion leaders allied to him have already aban-
doned all talk of strike action at the appeal of
the Minister of Labour.

With regard to Tampoe, his usual fake fight-
ing has been displayed now quite for sometime.
With the assistance of his centrist friends of
the United Secretariat Tampoe obtained pub-
licity in their journals for a "One-Day Hunger
Strike" of workers in protest at the actions
and policies of the government. In fact, during
all this time, workers in a number of work
places belonging to other non-coalition unions
came out on strike despite the possibilities of
government action against them. It was thus a
(continued next page)

ing CIA funds in the process. Many of the
ICFTU unions had earlier been part of the
Stalinist- dominated World Federation of Trade
Unions and their split was one of the first
steps of the "Cold War" launched by U.S.
imperialism.

24

SPARTACIST

. . . Ceylon

false picture which Tampoe sought to paint, that
where no one dared to call strikes under emer-
gency conditions, he at least called a "Hunger
Strike" of workers against the government! In
fact, the journals of the United Secretariat had
referred to a "Hunger Strike" of one million
workers.' But this so-called one -day hunger
strike was farcical.

The response from vested interests was
especially interesting. In its editorial com-
ments of the Ceylon Daily News which congratu-
lated Tampoe on this one-day non-violent
"Hunger Strike," called upon him to continue
longer this strike as Finance Minister N.M,
Perera himself would readily approve in view
of the worsening food situation in the country!

And Tampoe 's reaction to the talk of pre-
senting "twenty-eight demands" of the coali-
tion unions was to call his usual "short leave"
strike (2 -hour strike) for a mass rally of the
CMU at which he was the only speaker, and at
which he called upon Ceylon's working class to
abandon the coalition and other trade -union
leaders and adopt the banner of the CMU!

Tampoe's political line in the present con-
text is the same treacherous line of "Left
Unity" that the LSSP and CP peddled before
they finally adopted coalition with the SLFP.
Tampoe has issued a call to "Re-Buildthe Left
Movement" when what is imperative is to con-
sistently and uncompromisingly expose the
"Leftism" of the LSSP, of both wings of the
CP(M), of the groups of the CP(Peking) and all
other "left" fakers. It is the task of the revolu-
tionary vanguard to expose the fraudulent poli-
tics of Tampoe which he continues in the name
of Trotskyism.

The revolutionary vanguard has the task of
exposing both the fraud of the CP(M) Wickrema-
singhe wing which continues to peddle coalition
class- collaborationist politics and also the
rightist course which the SLFP and LSSP are
pursuing to please the vested interests, local
and foreign.

It is necessary more especially to warn the
working class that the coalition government is
now moving, not to woo the working class, but
to suppress and destroy the trade -union move-
ment and all the organisations of the working
class, which could well pave the way for a fully
fledged military police regime.

It is clear that in the present state of the
trade-union leadership, both of the pro-
government coalition unions and of the so-
called independent unions, the task of mobili-

sing the workers for united struggle against the
government and the capitalist class is far from
easy. Nevertheless, this remains the burning
question for the working class today. This
means it is the task of the revolutionary van-
guard to begin now the struggle against the
latest measures of the government and for
other pressing demands of the workers and
toilers including demands of a transitional
character, in the teeth of the opposition of the
bureaucratic trade-unionleaders— of the coali-
tion as well as of the so-called independent
unions, including the Tampoe-led CMU.

In fact, in recent times anti-bureaucratic
tendencies have appeared in many trade unions
both pro- government and in others. In certain
unions the anti-bureaucratic oppositions have
succeeded in ousting the conservative and bu-
reaucratic leaderships in such unions. This
process could well grow.

The revolutionary vanguard, while taking
active steps to root itself within the working
class will fight for a program of demands
which will include trade -union demands and
also demands of a transitional character, e.g.,
nationalisation without compensation of the
whole of the plantations, of manufacturing in-
dustries, workers control in all nationalised
undertakings. It will also include demands for
the withdrawal of the state of emergency and
for the release of a;il political prisoners. In
this regard the tradition of reformists and cen-
trists has been to merely list transitional de-
mands without seeking to develop any struggle
around these demands.

It is in this perspective that the Revolution-
ary Workers Party is seeking today to inter-
vene in the Ceylon situation. And it is not the
futile and divisive policy of building new trade
unions that is needed, but a policy of giving
revolutionary perspective and bringing revolu-
tionary politics to the advanced elements in the
existing trade unions, by the building of political
caucuses in them; that is the task.

This intervention by the Revolutionary
Workers Party is necessarily limited by its
present forces and resources. But it is to the
extent that the Revolutionary Workers Party
succeeds in intervening in the living working
class and mass movement in a revolutionary
perspective, and to the extent that it succeeds
in carrying on an uncompromising and con-
sistent struggle against Stalinism, Maoism and
all forms of reformism and revisionism,
whether of the United Secretariat variety or of
the Healy variety, that it will be able to engage
with success in the struggle for Trotskyism,
for the buildingof the revolutionary leadership,
i.e. the revolutionary party, in Ceylon. ■

WINTER 1973-74

25

usee

Covers Up

Tampoe

Scandal

In the 19 March 1973 issue of Intercontinental Press
(Vol. 11, No. 10) there appeared an article entitled
"Ceylon and the Healy School of Falsification" by
Jaya Vithana. It purports to be a defense against
alleged slanders against Bala Tampoe (head of the
Ceylon section of the "United Secretariat of the Fourth
International") emanating from the Healyite press,
i.e., a series of articles in the Socialist Labour
League's Workers Press partially reprinted in the
Bulletin of the U.S. Workers League. The Vithana
article is a typical piece of revisionist obscurantism
in which is concealed one giant lie: a denial of the
legitimacy of 1 documents of the United Secretariat
itself which were reprinted originally in Spartacist
No. 21. As usual, the unprincipled organizational con-
duct of the Healyites provided the U.Sec Pabloists a
convenient way to get themselvesoff the hook— almost.

Tampoe Unmasked by Spartacist

A bit of history is in order. Last year the Sparta-
cist League drew the attention of the international
working-class movement to the United Secretariat's
shameless cover-up of a series of accusations brought
against Bala Tampoe by its own supporters at the
U.Sec. 's "Ninth World Congress" held in April 1969.
In Spartacist No. 21 we published a majority report
("Ceylon Commission Report") and a minority report
("Indian Delegate's Report") from the Ceylon Com-
mission of the "World Congress" as well as extracts
from the official "World Congress" minutes which
verified the fact of the Ceylon Commission while
totally suppressing its content. These documents were
made available to us by Edmund Samarakkody, a
veteran Ceylonese socialist militant now associated
with the RWP of Ceylon, at whose insistence the Cey-
lon Commission was convened. Comrade Samarakkody
was at that time a member of the outgoing International
Executive Committee of the U.Sec. We also published
Comrade Samarakkody 's letter to us authenticating the
documents and explaining the events surrounding the
Ceylon Commission at the "World Congress."

It is not surprising that the publication of these
documents initiated a world-wide furor. The two re-
ports came to somewhat different conclusions, but
only over the question of what to do about Tampoe in
the face of specific allegations whose reliability the
Commission did not at any point call into question:
Tampoe's acceptance of a trip to the U.S. in 1967
financed by the Asia Foundation; Tampoe's private

interview in Washington with McNamara; Tampoe's
attendance at small social gatherings of imperialist
diplomats; Tampoe's conduct as head of the Ceylon
Mercantile Union. *
The "Worlci Congress" agreed on a series of rec^
ommendations which reaffirmed Tampoe's LSSP(R) as
the Ceylon section but also called for the constituting
of an investigative body as well as for the termination
of Tampoe's dual function as head of both the CMU and
the LSSP(R). (We have no information as to whether the
former was ever carried out, but the latter certainly
was not.) In our view, however, what made the Tampoe
scandal important was not merely the unmasking of a
politically corrupt individual posing as a Trotskyist,
but the full complicity of the U.Sec, which published
only the evasive recommendations of the Commission
while suppressing the uncontested facts, as contained
in the reports upon which the recommendations were
based.

Healyites Muddy the Waters

Almost immediately upon publicationof these docu-
ments in Spartacist, the political bandits of the Healy
tendency rushed forward to try to claim the Tampoe
scandal as their own "scoop." The Ceylon Commission
reports and the extracts from the "World Congress"
minutes filled the pages ot' Workers Press, along with
sundry additional charges against Tampoe. The re-
sponse of the U.Sec. and its American ally, the
Socialist Workers Party, was predictable. Making full
use of the Healyites' world-wide and well-deserved
reputation for irresponsible slander and physical
gangsterism, these revisionist cynics—well aware of
the authenticity of the documents as well as of the fact
that they had been first revealed in Spartacist, a
publication well known for its scrupulous honesty and
accuracy— sought to pass off their own "World Con-
gress" reports as just another Healyite slander (see
"Healyites Smear Bala Tampoe," Intercontinental
(continued next page)

SPARTAOST

(Fourth Internationalist)

AN ORGAN OF
REVOLUTIONARY MARXISM

EDITORS: Managing, Elizabeth Gordon; James
Robertson; Joseph Seymour.

BUSINESS MANAGER: Anne Kelley.

Published for the Central Committee of the
Spartacist League/U.S. by the Spartacist Pub-
lishing Company, Box 1377, G.P.O., New York,
N.Y. 10001. Telephone: 925-8234.

Opinions expressed in signed articles or letters
do not necessarily express the editorial view-
point.

Number 22 :«$ x 523 Winter 1973-74

26

SPARTACIST

. . . Tampoe Scandal

Press, 20 November 1972). Faced with such a chal-
lenge, the Healyites were compelled to acknowledge
the source of the material, trumpeting about Samarak-
kody's credentials and even once or twice mentioning
Spartacist, But Healy had already played into the hands
of the U.Sec, allowing the real evidence against
Tampoe to be dismissed as coming from a tarnished
source rather than from suppressed documents of
Tampoe's collaborators, the U.Sec. itself.

Havir^ once been given a handle, the Pabloists are
understandably unwillir^ to let go. Their final smoke-
screen, the Vithana article— which is apparently in-
tended as the definitive response— devoted eight pages
in Intercontinental Press to an all-out barrage.
Vithana replied at length to various charges against
the Ceylonese Pabloists emanating from the Healyites
themselves (we must note in passing that there is no
response at all to our accusations against Tampoe's
conduct following the "World Congress" which were
published in Spartacist, based on materials of the
Ceylonese RWP, as part of an introduction to the U.Sec.
documents) and he exposes, quite possibly accurately,
the unprincipled conduct of the Ceylon Healyites. But
concealed beneath all this is the essence of the U.Sec. 's
response to the publication of the Ceylon Commission

: documents— a flat denial of their authenticity.

" And the attempted bluff falls flat on its face. For

INTERNMIONAL
IHFOR»MIOM BUllETIM

r.nnttnte

„n.TESO. THE ™«.«S SINCE H..~.0.
(Ninth World ConsreBs)
April 1969

ternatlonsl)

SOCIAIIST WORKERS PARTY

Vithana attempts to disprove too much.

Aware that the copies of the original Ceylon Com-
mission reports were collected back from the partici-
pants, and thus that the only written proof they ever
existed is the copies made by Comrade Samarakkody
for his own use, Vithana begins by slandering Comrade
Samarakkody and declaring these reports a fabrication:
"What is the 'evidence' against comrades Bala and
others? It goes as follows: (i) Reports alleged to have
been made by a 'commission' of the United Secretar-
iat of the Fourth International. . . . The first of these
lies the Healyites borrowed from the Spartacists of
the USA, who recently published a series of allega-
tions against Comrade Bala Tampoe. They were made
by Mr. Edmund Samarakkody. . . ."
We must point out here Vithana 's sleight-of-hand
in attributing the "allegations" against Tampoe only to
Samarakkody, whereas in fact his central accusations
were verified and repeated in the reports of the Ceylon
Commission published in Spartacist. Thus, in his im-
passioned denials of various "allegations" against
Tampoe, Vithana waxes indignant about "slanders" by
Comrade Samarakkody and the Spartacist League, but
neglects to mention that these "slanders" were
in fact the findings of the U.Sec. 's own Commission'.
It was the Ceylon Commission Report, reprinted in
Spartacist, which said:

"The Commission felt that some of the actions and
policies of Comrade Bala and the LSSP(R) brought to
our attention by Comrade Edmund and not denied by
Comrade Bala could have seriously damaged the repu-

"•■•loo i„4 b«.n .bj, tj^*"""* Co.-

„ Continuation

=o-i..io. ..a?f^-5j:;|»,-?.

IK.

the next IHt

c'o^^r^^.''^'»"""•"o^'?ro^

°' =°"»'"ion r.po„ b,

"''^'^ 'OP
S..,ion recon».Md.
Cb-lntM, Oor.1.,

"ten la vlei^^of on«I .^temporai-j

O" public jo^„Jf
«W^pIbU°°"t;"" '■"'"trmlc rr„,

.pfu'° "•-^"Tp".".i?f: .„^orh^^

"■•PortJ^'iiJiO" 'Jo *rg.ntin. Conui..,

WINTER 1973-74

27

tation of Comrade Bala as a revolutionary leader

In this context, we refer especially to the following
examples:— (a) A series of incidents which together
constitute compromisingly close relations between
Comrade Bala and the Ceylonese embassies or mis-
sions of the imperialist countries " (our emphasis)

it was the Indian Delegate's Report which said:

"Although Comrade Bala maintains that he had kept
the United Secretariat and SWP informed about his
trip, some of his activities in Washington like his in-
terview with McNamara have not been fully explained."
It was the Ceylon Commission Report which, referring
to "the subordination of the policies of the LSSP(R) to
the union [Tampoe's CMU]," stated categorically that;
"... in none of these instances is there any evidence
that the party took what the Commission considered
a policy consistent with revolutionary Marxism."
Let Vithana and his U.Sec. colleagues try to squirm
out of that with protestations about Spartacist League
"slanders":

Giant Bluff Fails

Short of taking decisive and immediate action to
oust Tampoe as a renegade and an individual demon-
stratedly unfit to be a leader of even the revisionist
U.Sec— a course the U.Sec. rejected when it sup-
pressed the content of the reports themselves— the only
alternative remaining for these fake-Trotskyists was
to invoke the deservedly foul reputation of the Healy-
ites, sling mud wildly at Samarakkody and the Sparta-
cist League and deny everything. This was the thank-
less task which fell to Vithana. Accordingly, he writes:
"Was there such a report as Healy and his friends
claim? In fact Mr. Samarakkody claims that there
are two such reports, a minority and a majority re-
port. In fact the USFI appointed no such commission.
Nor is there such a report or reports." (our emphasis)
Vithana has overreached himself. Had he confined
himself to the one enormous lie that there were not
reports, the issue might have to be judged— as many
issues must be judged in real political life—solely on
the basis of political logic and the reputation and
record of the contendir^ parties. Were this the case,

woRkeits 1

Name

Address

C ity/State/Z ip

I I Enclosed is $3 for 24 issues
I I Enclosed is $1 for 8 issues^ '

includes SPARTACIST

order from/pay to: Spartacist Publishing Co.

Box 1377. GPO/NY. NY 10001

we would have to point out again such corroborating
evidence as the fact that the operational conclusions of
the majority report as published in Spartacist are
identical to the five recommendations of the Ceylon
Commission as published in the "World Congress"
official minutes. We would have to ask whether it is
likely that the "World Congress" would have recom-
mended that Tampoe terminate either his role as head
of the Ceylon Mercantile Union or his leadership of the
LSSP(R) unless some gross political irregularities at
least on this point had been demonstrated to the
satisfaction of all Commission participants. We would
have to point to the whole pattern of conduct of the
U.Sec. and its predecessor body in Ceylon, And we
would still be entirely justified in demanding that pro-
fessed Trotskyists take a stand on the basis of the
available evidence and denounce any who would hide
their political complicity behind know-nothingism and
the cynical bourgeois aphorism that "the truth is
always somewhere in between."

But, caught up in the technique of the big lie, Vithana
has gone one step further, thereby reducing his cred-
ibility below zero: he has denied that the Ceylon Com-
mission ever took placel But in his eagerness to bury
the Tampoe scandal once and for all, Vithana has run
smack up against the "World Congress" minutes them-
selves, which reported the constitution of a Ceylon
Commission, noted a verbal report from the Com-
mission and a discussion and reprinted a five-part
motioni (The relevant extracts from the minutes were
reprinted in Spartacist No. 21). In fact, these minutes
are available to any SWP member possessing a back
file of SWP internal bulletins, (see SWP International
Information Bulletin No. 9, July 1969) and presum-
ably to members of other organizations associated
with or affiliated to the U.Sec. Thus, like Tampoe—
exposed by the reports of his own "World Congress"
—Vithana stands condemned as a liar by the official
minutes of his own organization:

We can only echo Vithana's sentiments that "History
has strange ways of unmasking slanderers and liars
in the working-class movement": ■

SM Young
Spaitacus

™ Orgon of the Revolutionary Communist Youth,
youth soctlon of the SfMrtocItt League

Formerly the RCY NEWSLETTER

Name.

Address.

City /State/Zip.

^feifl Make payable/mail to:

RCY Newsletter Publisliing Co.

6 ISSUES Cooper Station

New York, New York 10003

SPARTACIST

. . . Letter to OCRFI

(continued from page 32)

elaborated on this conception over the German crisis
of 1929-33 and also in his discussions withSWP lead-
ers in 1940 regarding an approach by the SWP to the
Communist Party U.S.A.

The united front is nothing more than a means, a
tactic, by which the revolutionary party, i.e. its pro-
gram and authority, can in times of crisis mobilize
and then win over masses (at that time supporters of
other parties) by means of concrete demands for com-
mon action made to the reformist organizations. Any
other interpretation must base itself on a supposed
latent revolutionary vanguard capacity within the re-
formist or Stalinist parties themselves— a central
proposition of Pabloism.

The aim of the united front must be to embed the
revolutionary program in the masses. In the same way,
in the highest expression of the united front, the Sovi-
ets, the condition for their conquest of power is the
ascendency of the revolutionary program. Any form
of fetishism toward the mere form of united fronts or
Soviets (or for that matter toward trade unions or fac-
tory committees) means abdicating as revolutionists,
because at bottom it is the dissolution of the vanguard
party into the class through the substitution of such
forms (and other politicsl) for the role of the revolu-
tionary party. This is not Leninism but at best a var-.
iant of Luxemburgism. One of Lenin's greatest
achievements in counterposing the revolutionary van-
guard to the reformists was to transcend the Kautsky-
ian conception of "the party of the whole class." To
place emphasis upon some mass form at the expense
of the vanguard party would be to smuggle back in the
Kautskyian conception.

When erstwhile revolutionary forces are qualita-
tively weak in comparison to mass reformist or Stal-
inist parties it is, in ordinary circumstances, equally
illusory either to make direct "united front" appeals
to the large formations or to advocate combinations
among such large forces (when Trotsky called for the
united front between the SPD and KPD he believed that
the latter still had a revolutionary potential).

Certainly the tactics appropriate to a full-fledged
revolutionary party cannot be mechanically assigned
to a grouping qualitatively lacking the capacity to strug-
gle to take the leadership of the class. However, the
differences in functioning are in the opposite direction
from those projected by the OCI. To the extent that the
revolutionary tendency must function as a propaganda
league, the more it must stress the presentation of its
full program. As Trotsky noted, in the first instance
Bolshevism is built upon granite foundations, and ma-
neuvers can only be carried out in a principled fashion
upon that foundation. The united front of the working
class, of course, is the maneuver on the grand scale.

(2) Bolivian FOR: We do not believe that the POR's
participation in the emigre Revolutionary Anti -Impe-
rialist Front (FRA) fell from the skies. We agree with
the OCI and the OCRFI resolution that the FRA-creat-
ed following the coup of the rightist general Banzer,
incorporating elements of the "national bourgeoisie"
including General Torres— is a popular front and not
the continuation of the Popular Assembly, which may

have possessed the essential formal prerequisites to
be a proletarian soviet pole in opposition to the earlier
regime of the leftist general Torres. It appears to us
that in the period of the Torres regime the best that
can be said of the POR is that it subordinated the de-
velopment of the vanguard party to that of the Popular
Assembly, i.e. subordinated the revolutionary program
to an ill-defined and vacillating collection of left na-
tionalist and Stalinist political prejudices. Given the
default of revolutionists, thePopular Assembly neces-
sarily concretely possessed a core of Menshevist ac-
quiescence to the "national bourgeoisie." For further
elaboration, see Workers Vanguard No. 3. In our es-
timation the POR's earlier policy, which the OCRFI
resolution emphatically supports, is an embodiment
of the erroneous conception of a "strategic united
front" and demonstrates the resulting subordination of
the vanguard organization to the mass organization,
in this case to the Popular Assembly. -

Prolonged periods of repression there have severe-
ly limited our knowledge of or contact with the Bolivian
POR, but it appears to us on the basis of available evi-
dence that the organization has played a characteris-
tically centrist role at least as far back as the revo-
lutionary upheaval in 1952.

(3) Stalinism: We note that in the past the OCI has
tended to equate the struggle against imperialism with
the struggle against Stalinism, e.g. the slogans ad-
vanced at the 1971 Essen Conference. The general Po-
litical Resolution submitted by the OCI and adopted by
the OCRFI takes this equation one step further when it
denies the "double nature" of the Stalinist bureaucracy,
writing of it simply as "the organism of the bourgeoisie

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WINTER 1973-74

29

within the working-class movement." Perhaps the OCI
has been led to this false formulation through a sim-
plistic linear extension of the true and valuable insight
that the class struggles of the workers cut across the
"Iron Curtain."

To us, and we believe to Trotsky, the Stalinist bu-
reaucracy has a.\ contradictory character. Thus in 1939
it conciliated Hitler and undermined the defense of the
Soviet Union. But beginning in 1941 it fought (badlyl)
against the Hitlerite invasion. Thus our wartime policy
was one of revolutionary defensism toward the Soviet
Union, i.e, to fight against the imperialist invader and
to overthrow the bureaucracy through political revolu-
tion, with by no means the least aim being to remove
the terrible bureaucratic impediment in that fight. In
the Indochinese war the role of the Hanoi bureaucracy,
and our attitude toward it and the tasks of the Viet-
namese proletariat, are essentially the same.

In the SWP's 1953 factional struggle, the Cannon-
Dobbs majority sought to defend itself against the
Cochran-Clarke Pabloist minority by putting forth a
position (similar to that of the OCRFI), that the Stalin-
ist bureaucracy is "counter-revolutionary through and
through and to the core." Since this was a possibility
truly applicable only to capitalist restorationist ele-
ments, in their most extreme form either fascist or
CIA agents, the SWP majority was compelled to commit
a host of political blunders in attempting to defend its
formulation; and in fact this position, along with Can-
non's advocacy of federated internationalism, repre-
sented departures from Trotskyism which helped un-
dermine the revolutionary fibre of the SWP.

Also in this connection we note the OCI's analysis
of Cuba in La Verity No. 557, July 1972. The OCI's
refusal - to draw the conclusion from its analysis—
which until that point parallels our own— that Cuba,
qualitatively, is a deformed workers state indicates
the potential departure from the Leninist theory of the
state in favor of a linear, bourgeois conception as of a
thermometer which simply and gradually passes from
"bourgeois state" to "workers state" by small incre-
ments without a qualitative change. Such a methodology
is a cornerstone of Pabloism. According to this concep-
tion, presumably the reverse process from "workers"
to "bourgeois" state by small incremental shifts could
be comparably possible, Trotsky correctly denounced
this latter idea as "unwinding the film of reformism
in reverse." We note however that the OCI appears in-
consistent on the characterization of the Cuban state;
"The Tasks of Rebuilding the Fourth International"
(in La Correspondance Internationale, June 1972, page
20) calls for the "unconditional defense of the Soviet
Union, China, Cuba, of workers' conquests in Eastern
Europe, of the revolutionary war in Vietnam. ..."

(4) On the Youth: We note that the relation of the
OCI to the Alliance des Jeunes pour le Socialisme is
unprecedented in the history of Leninist practice and,
in fact, represents a catering to petty-bourgeois dual
vanguardist sentiment in the student milieu. We also
oppose the subsidiary concept of a non-Trotskyist
"Revolutionary Youth International" put forward at the
Essen Conference in July 1971. The revdlutionary
youth movement must be programmatically subordin-
ate and formally organizationally linked to the vanguard
party, which encompasses the historic experience of
the proletariat. Unless this is the case, student and

youth militants can never transcend petty -bourgeois
radicalism which at crucial times the proletarian van-
guard will find counterposed to itself.

(5) Violence and the Class Lme: We strongly oppose
the OCI's stated willingness to use the bourgeois state
apparatus— the courts— to mediate disputes in the
working-class movement. In addition, the SL/U.S. is
unalterably opposed to the use of physical force to
suppress the views of other working-class tendencies
where that is the central issue, such as the OCI's
forcible prevention of the distribution of leaflets by
the IKD at the July 1971 Essen Conference. We are
not pacifists, and fully recognize the right of self-
defense by ourselves or anyone else in the socialist
and labor movements to protect meetings and demon-
strations froni physical assault and to protect indivi-
dual militants from terroristic attack. Taken all to-
gether, our view flows from the proposition that the
greatest free play of ideas within the workers move-
ment strengthens the position of revolutionists and
enhances the possibility for united class action. Con-
versely, it is the reformists and Stalinists— the labor
lieutenants of capital— who most characteristically
employ violence and victimization within the
movement.

(6) International Committee: The OCRFI resolu-
tion, "On the Tasks of the Reconstruction of the Fourth
International," states that, starting in 1966, the SLL
"started down the same path which the SWP had pre-
viously taken." But further on, the resolution deplores
the "explosion of the IC caused by the SLL," on the
grounds that this latest split "aggravates the disper-
sion" which began in 1952. We consider that organiza-
tional forms should correspond to political realities.
We strongly opposed the break by the SLL ("IC") with
us in 1962 because of its apparently mainly organiza-
tional character. Only after the very sharp rupture at
the 1966 London Conference, and especially in the
several years following when the SLL piled up a series
of major political differences with us, were we able

(continued next page)

SUB!^€RIBE

Name_

Address.

City/State/ Zip.

nMake checks payable/mail to:
SPARTACIST PUBLISHING CO.
Box 1377, GPO
4 issues New York, N. Y. 10001

lilbmen and
Revolution

30

SPARTACIST

. . . Letter to OCRFI

to appreciate that the SLL's desire in 1962 to make a
rapprochement to the SWP then (to which we were
willing to acquiesce but not agree with) was an ex-
pression of a fundamental political difference.

The SLL's break with us in 1962 was, however,
part of a real struggle within the American group.
The 1971 SLL-OCI break seems to have been but a
separation of bloc partners without visible repercus-
sions within either group— hence without struggle how-
ever unclear.

At bottom, differing estimations of the split in the
IC may reflect the linguistically slight but nonetheless
real differences between the OCI's "For the Recon-
struction of the Fourth International" and the SL's
"For the Rebirth of the Fourth International." Our
slogan implies that a very fundamental process must
be gone through; that it is not possible simply to fit
together existing bits and pieces, perhaps with a
little chipping here or there, in order to put the edi-
fice together again.

Since the SL/U.S. has itself already had a ten-year
history with the IC, we cannot simply approach the
OCRFI discussions as if the previous experience be-
tween main elements in the OCRFI who had been part
of the former IC and ourselves did not exist. There-
fore we must review that past experience since it
conditions our approach to the OCRFI.

Our views on the development of the IC since 1966
are set forth initially in Spartacist No. 6 (June -July
1966) on the London 1966 Conference and our expul-
sion; in the article on the Healy-Wohlforth current
in Spartacist No. 17-18 (August-September 1970); in
Spartacist No. 20 (April-May 1971) which is a summary
of political and organizational developments since
1966; and in Workers Fang^rd No. 3 (December 1971)
on the SLL-OCI split. As you will note from these
materials, from the time we first became aware of it
at the London Conference, we protested the absence of
democratic centralism in the IC.

We believe that one of the necessary tests of gen-
uine revolutionists is the demonstrated capacity to
even ruthlessly undertake self-criticism. The "Inter-
national Committee" dominated by the SWP from 1954
to 1963 and by the SLL from 1963 to 1971 was always
partly fictitious and partly a formalization of blocs of
convenience by essentially national organizations. This
demands explanation by those who would not simply
repeat their previous experience. It is not enough to
pass over the last eighteen years with the promise
that from now on things will be done differently.

We were definitively expelled from the Healyite
international conglomeration in 1966 at the very time
the OCRFI pinpoints as the beginning of the SLL's
downhill slide. We believe there is a relationship.
Evidently as part of the OCI's attempt to remain in a
common bloc with the SLL, and perhaps in part
through ignorance of our real positions, the OCI has
over the years projected upon the SL/U.S. a series
of positions. Not only do we not hold, nor have we
ever held, these views, but most of them are the exact
opposite of our views. For example, the OCI asserted
that we believe in the "family of Trotskyism" even

though at the 1966 London Conference our delegation
was struck by the aptness of an OCI speaker's state-
ment "there is no family of Trotslqrism" and our
speaker specifically quoted that observation approv-
ingly, as was reported in Spartacist No. 6 and many
times since. In the "Statement by the OCI" of 1967 on
the IC, reference is repeatedly made to a "VO-
Robertson bloc" and the general conclusion drawn
that "the struggle against Robertson is fully identi-
fied with the struggle against Pabloism. His positions
join those of the SWP and the United Secretariat where
they are not those of Pablo." The OCI in similar terms
apologized to the SLL for the invitation of an SL/U.S.
observer to the Essen Conference.

The SL/U.S. was aware from 1962 on that the OCI
tendency was not to be equated with the SLL, and
after our expulsion from the London Conference we
continued to note the difference (for example in
Spartacist No. 17-18, in discussing Healy's attempted
rapprochement with the United Secretariat, we wrote
of the Healy-Banda group "and their politically far
superior but internationally quiescent French allies,
the ^ambert group." We also knew through private
sources that at least since 1967 the Wohlforth group
internally had been conducting a vigorous campaign
to discredit the OCL

Our characterization of the OCI as politically
superior to the SLL was based on a series of political
positions which the OCI held in common with us in
counterposition to the views of the SLL. Recent OCI
polemics against the SLL (e.g. La Verity No. 556)
note the OCI's objection to several key SLL positions
which we had also opposed: the SLL's willful use of
"dialectics" as a mystification to hide political ques-
tions; the SLL's chronic tailending of Stalinism in
Vietnam; the SLL's enthusing over the Chinese "Red
Guards"; the SLL's notion of a classless "Arab Rev-
olution"; the SLL's unprincipled approach to the United
Secretariat-SWP in 1970. We also considered of im-
portance the OCI's objection to the SLL position that
Pabloist revisionism had not organizationally de-
stroyed the Fourth International. The OCI's position
on this question appears to correspond to the view
we have consistently held and upon which we spoke
insistently at the 1966 London Conference.

Moreover, we have always taken a very serious
attitude toward the OCI, not because of its numbers
but because of its experienced senior cadres and its
continuity in the world movement. We have centered
in this letter on the presumed differences between us
and the OCI, but the strengths of the OCI have re-
flected themselves as well, in specific political posi-
tions, some of which we have learned from, such as
the OCI's insistence on the basic class unity across the
whole of Europe, the "Iron Curtain" notwithstanding.
Other positions as noted above we have developed in
an independent but parallel fashion. Above all, we
respect the OCI for its adamant attempt to give life to
its internationalism.

That is why we patiently waited when no other option
was open to us vis-a-vis the OCI, and when we had the
opportunity we have persistently sought discussion. It
was especially with the OCI in mind that in the con-
cluding portion of our final statement upon being ex-
pelled from the London Conference in 1966 we stated,

WINTER 1973-74

31

"If the comrades go ahead to exclude us from this con-
ference, we ask only what we have asked before— study
our documents, including our present draft on U.S.
work before you now, and our work over the next
months and years. We will do the same, and a unifi-
cation of the proper Trotskyist forces will be achieved,
despite this tragic setback."

Recently, in the document "The Tasks of Re-
building the Fourth International" (which the introduc-
tion to the English edition states is "central to [the]
international discussion"), the OCI characterized the
SL from the 1966 Conference as "centrist" or
"centrist-sectarian. " Thus, rather than following our
documents and our ongoing work as we asked in 1966,
the OCI has simply continued to echo the SLL's
avalanche of falsehood aimed at our political obliter-
ation. In the light of the above points, this would seem
an appropriate time for the OCI and with it the OCRFI
to undertake a thorough examination of the SL's
politics.

We do not expect, and would have no confidence in,
a simple reversal of appraisal of the SL/U.S. by the
OCI. Estimations of the SL/U.S. by the groups com-
prising the OCRFI should be guided by two considera-
tions. One is the questions of general political and
programmatic character such as we have gone into
above. We naturally believe that we are correct about
these; but because our views have taken shape within
the American Trotskyist framework (and during a
period of enforced national isolation) we must allow
that they may be partial, and in ways which we cannot
presently know. As the main Political Report to our
recent National Conference stated: "The SL/U.S. ur-
gently requires disciplined subordination to an inter-
national leadership not subject to the deforming pres-
sures of our particular national situation." (see
Workers Vanguard No. 15, January 1973) It was in this
spirit that we published our article "Genesis of
Pabloism" (Spartacist No. 21, Fall 1972) which con-
tained substantially the sum total of our present under-
standing of Pabloism.

The other question, subordinate but within the
framework of essential programmatic agreement very
important and perhaps contributory to that program-
matic agreement is the question of comrades inter-
nationally understanding the concrete reality of the
socialist movement in the U.S. in the context of the
evolved American labor movement and the specific
configuration of class relations in this country. There
is a striking lack of correspondence between the ex-
isting divisions within the ostensibly Marxist move-
ments in Europe and America so that any effort to
superimpose groups in Europe on "similar" groups
in the U.S. is inappropriate. The six-months' stay by
Comrade Sharpe in France was extremely helpful in
bringing this point home to us. It would be extremely
clarifying for example if a representative of the OCI
could come to this country for an extended stay to
examine, for example, not only the SL/U.S. in its con-
crete work, but also currents such as the "Vanguard
Newsletter" of Turner- Fender, which has stood appar-
ently closest formally to the OCI; the International
Socialists, who mainly look to^ Lutte Ouvri^re as their
closest friends in France, but who contain sympathi-
zers of the OCI among them; and the other tendencies

within the American radical movement. Moreover, the
trade unions as they have evolved here should be
examined in the union offices and on picket lines. More
broadly, characteristic college campuses and the
reality of the National Student Association should be
investigated.

We take our commitment as internationalists
seriously as a condition for our very survival as
Marxian revolutionists, and by this we mean neither
diplomatic non-aggression pacts with groups in other
countries nor the Healyite fashion of exporting sub-
servient mini-SLLs. As one of the results of what is
for us precipitous growth domestically, we are ac-
quiring the resources— human and material— to under-
take for the first time on a sustained basis our
international obligations.

It is in the context of our need for a disciplined
International and our firm commitment to fight to
bring about the programmatic agreement which forms
the only basis for such an International, that we wish
to participate in the discussion opened by the OCRFI.

We are enclosing copies of all our documents
referred to in this letter. Should we be accepted into
the discussion organized by the OCRFI, in order to
familiarize comrades internationally with our views,
we would like to submit three documents initially to
the discussion: (1) this letter, (2) our delegation's re-
marks to the 1966 London Conference, (3) our State-
ment of Principles.

Fraternally,

Political Bureau
Spartacist League/U.S,

cc. Spartacist League/ Australia-New Zealand

Spartacist Local Directory

BERKELEY-OAKLAND
Box 852, Main P.O.
Berkeley, CA 94701
(415) 653-4668

BOSTON
Box 188, M.I.T. Sta.
Cambridge, MA 02139
(617) 492-3928

BUFFALO
Box 412, Station C
Buffalo, NY 14209
(716) 837-1854

CHICAGO
Box 6471, Main P.O.
Chicago, XL 60680
(312) 728-2151

CLEVELAND
Box 6765

Cleveland, OH 44101
(216) 651-9147

DETROIT
Box 663A, General P.O
Detroit, MI 48232
(313) 921-4626

LOS ANGELES
Box 38053, Wilcox Sta.
Los Angeles, CA 90038
(213) 467-6855

NEW ORLEANS
Box 51634, Main P.O.
New Orleans, LA 70151
(504) 866-8384

NEW YORK
Box 1377, G.P.O.
New York, NY 10001
(212) 925-2426

SAN DIEGO
Box 22052, Univ. City Sta
San Diego, CA 92122
(714) 272-2286

SAN FRANCISCO
Box 1757

San Francisco, CA 94101
(415) 653-4668

32

SPARTACIST

WINTER 1973-74

Letter to the OCRFI
and the OCI

15 January 1973

Organizing Committee for the Reconstruction of the

Fourth International; and .
Organisation Communiste Internationaliste

Dear Comrades,

At the Third National Conference of the Spartacist
League/U.So we held a major discussion on the Organ-
izing Committee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth
International (OCRFI), based on our translations from
the October 1972 issue of La Correspondance Interna-
tionale containing the basic documents and discussion
from your international conference of July 1972. We
were also guided by the reports of our comrades
Sharpe and Foster of their discussions last summer
with comrade DeM. of the OCI.

We give serious attention to the OCRFI because we
note that some of the steps that it has undertaken go in
the direction of resolving the impasse which has existed
between the SL/U,S. and the International Committee
(IC) since November 1962, and the acute hostility be-
tween us after the April 1966 IC Conference in London.
We are in agreement with the stated goal of the OCRFI
to fight on the program of the Fourth International to
reconstruct a democratic-centralist world party, and
to pursue this aim at present through a regulated po-
litical discussion in an international discussion bulle-
tin culminating in an international conference. We
note that toward this end your July conference did in-
deed represent a break with the federated bloc practice
of the former IC and was indeed markedby a real and
vigorous discussion such as was absent from the Third
Conference of the IC in London in 1966. Thus it appears
to us that on the face of it the OCRFI does possess one
of the essential qualities necessary for the struggle to
verify the authentic Trotskyist program and to measure
by that program the political practice, in its develop-
ment, of national groups participating in the discussion.
Therefore the SL/U.S„ has come to the conclusion that
it is part of our duty as internationalists to seek to
participate in this discussion.

We note that we fully meet the formal requirement
for admission to participation in your discussion pro-
cess as stated in the resolution, "On the Tasks of the
Reconstruction of the Fourth International," i.e., we
"state [our] will to fight on the program of the Fourth
International to reconstruct the leading center, which
[we] agree does not yet exist." (see our 1963 resolu-
tion, "Toward Rebirth of the Fourth International,"
and later documents) We are unable to request more
than simple admission to the discussion, rather than
admission to the Organizing Committee of the discus-
sion, because of our programmatic differences, un-
clarities about or simple unf amiliarity with views held
by members of the Organizing Committee, Since the
Organizing Committee also intends to work toward the
construction of national sections of the Fourth Inter-

national, we can hardly participate in such activities
given this programmatic ambiguity.

In our view, the preliminary purpose of a discussion
such as that envisaged by the OCRFI must be to crys-
tallize a series of decisive specific programmatic de-
mands analogous to the concrete points defining rev-
olutionary Marxist principle set forth by Trotsky in
the 1929-33 period as the basis for rallying forces
from the scattered and politically diverse milieu of
oppositional communists.

Therefore we should like to list some of the issues
which appear to us to pose differences or central am-
biguities between our views and those expressed by the
OCRFI or which have been advanced by the OCI, The
importance that we attach to these points is that if un-
resolved they threaten the Crystallization of a bona fide
and disciplined Trotskyist world movement and center.
Therefore from our present understanding these are
topics which merit particular discussion,

(1) United Front: We differ with the conception
of the "strategic united front" as practiced by the
OCI and as set forth in "For the Reconstruction of the
Fourth International" (especially Section IX, "Fight
for Power, Class United Front, Revolutionary Par-
ties") in La Verity No. 545, October 1969 and in the
general political resolution of the OCRFI. In terms of
the OCI's work in France, our position has been elabo-
rated in Workers Vanguard No. 11, September 1972.
We believe that we share with the first four Congres-
ses of the Communist International the view that the
united front is essentially a tactic used by revolution-
ists "to set the base against the top" under those ex-
ceptional conditions and decisive opportunities in which
the course of proletarian political life has flowed out-
side its normal channels. Comrade Trotsky heavily
(continued on page 28)

-Demandez:

No. 1: -Le Comity Internationale eclate
-Bolivie: debacle centriste

No. 2:

-Du SWP au Trotskysme

-D^cheance et chute des Black Panthers

No. 3: -Front populaire et soutien critique
-Rapport de la delegation Spartaciste
a la Conference de Londres (1966)

No. 4: -Lettre au Comity d'organisation pour la
reconstruction de la IVe Internationale
et t I'OCI

-Vers la scission dans le Secretariat Unifid
Spartacist Box 1377G.P.O., N.Y., N.Y.

SPARTAaST

NUMBER 23

SPRING 1977

50 CENTS

Toward the Rebirth of the Fourth International!

Declaration for
the Organizing
of an

International

Trotskyist

Tendency

ADOPTED IN JULY 1974

1 . The Spartacisi League of Australia and New Zealand
and the Spartacist League of the United States declare
themselves to be the nucleus for the early crystallization of
an international Trotskyist tendency based upon the 1966
Declaration of Principles and dedicated to the rebirth of
the Fourth International.

2. In a half dozen other countries parties, groups and
committees have expressed their general or specific
sympathy or support for the international Spartacist
tendency, as have scattered supporters or sympathizers
from a number of additional countries. Among these
groups and individuals are comrades, in both Europe and
Asia, possessing many years or even decades of experience
as cadres of the Trotskyist movement.

3. The Revolutionary Internationalist Tendency, a
small Marxist wing of the "United Secretariat," centered
on the United States and with supporters in Australia and
elsewhere, has seen its spokesmen expelled from their
national sections and parties for seeking to express their
views within the United Secretariat, that deeply factionally
divided and unprincipled conglomeration of reformists

continued on page 2

Trotsky near Naples, 1932.

Spartacusbund Expels Left
Opposition

Trotskyist Faction
Fuses witliTLD...24

2

SPARTACIST

Declaration for the
Organizing of an
International Trotskyist
Tendency. . .

and revisionists, latter-day Kautskys, Bukharins and
Pablos. If the main contenders in the "United Secretariat"
are united in their common and not-so-veiled class
collaborationist appetites, they are deeply divided between
the electoralism and placid neo-populism of, e.g., the
American Socialist Workers Party and the guerrilla-
terrorist enthusing of, e.g., the French ex-Ligue Commu-
niste. These differences reflect far more the differing
national milieus and resulting opportunist appetites than
they do any questions of principle. The recently concluded
"Tenth World Congress" of the United Secretariat refused
to hear or even acknowledge the appeal of RIT comrades
against their expulsion. The RIT forces are now making
common cause with the Spartacist tendency. They are but a
vanguard of those who will struggle out of the revisionist
swamp and toward revolutionary Marxism. Already in
France an oppositional Central Committee member of the
former Ligue Communiste has broken from the Front
Communiste Revolutionnaire (recently formed by Rouge)
in solidarity with the views of the RIT.

4. In Germany senior elements from the centrist and
now fragmented left split from the United Secretariat in
1969 are being won to the Spartacist tendency. They are
regrouping around the publication Kommunistische
Korrespondenz. In Germany three inextricable tasks are
posed for Leninists: to programmatically win over
subjectively revolutionary elements from among the
thousands of young left social democrats, centrists,
revisionists and Maoists; to fuse together intellectual and
proletarian elements, above all through the development
and struggle of communist industrial fractions; to inwardly
assimilate some thirty years of Marxist experience and
analysis from which the long break in continuity has left the

SPARTAOST

(Fourth Internationalist)
An Organ of Revolutionary Marxism

EDITORIAL BOARD: Charles O'Brien (managing), Elizabeth Gordon,
William Logan, James Robertson, John Sharpe
PRODUCTION MANAGER: Karen Allen
CIRCULATION MANAGER: Anne Kelley

Published for the Interim Secretariat of the international Spartacist
tendency, in accord with the "Declaration for the Organizing of an
International Trotskyist Tendency," by the Spartacist Publishing
Company, Box 1377, G.P.O., New York, N Y. 10001. Telephone:
966-6841.

Opinions expressed in signed articles or letters do not necessarily
express the editorial viewpoint.

Number 23 x."3 Spring 1977

new generation of German revolutionary Marxists still
partially isolated.

5. In Austria, Israel, Canada and elsewhere similar
splits, followed by revolutionary regroupment and growth,
are occurring. In Austria the initial nucleus came from
youth of the United Secretariat section. The "Vanguard"
group of Israel is the last still united section of the old
"International Committee" which split in 1971 between the
British Socialist Labour League's wing led by Gerry Healy
(with which the American Workers League of Wohlforth is
still united despite friction) and the French Organisation
Communiste Internationaliste led by Pierre Lambert
which subsequently lost most of its international support —
i.e., with the Bolivian Partido Obrero Revolucionario of G.
Lora and the European groupings around the Hungarian,
Varga, both breaking away. If the "Vanguard" group amid
this welter of disintegration is still unable to choose
between the counterposed claims of Healy and Lambert, it
did produce and promptly expel a principled and valiant
counter-tendency to both. In Canada youth from the
Revolutionary Marxist Group's Red Circles are being
drawn to Trotskyism. Everywhere unprincipled forma-
tions are subjected to the hammer blows of sharpened
capitalist crisis and upsurge in the class struggle.

6. In Ceylon where the historical consequences of
Pabloist revisionism have been most fully revealed, only
the Revolutionary Workers Party, led by the veteran
Trotskyist, Edmund Samarakkody, has emerged with
integrity from the welter of betrayals perpetrated by the old
LSSP and which were aided and abetted by the United
Secretariat, its unspeakable agent on the island, Bala
Tampoe, and the craven Healyite "International Commit-
tee." The R WP has been compelled to seek to generalize the
revolutionary Marxist program anew from Marxist class-
struggle principles.

7. The Spartacist tendency is now actively working for
the immediate convening of an international conference to
politically and geographically extend the tendency and to
further formalize and consolidate it. The tendency
organizing nucleus will seek to work in the closest
collaboration with sympathizing groups, particularly in
continuing and assuring a broadly-based and full written
and verbal discussion process leading to this international
conference.

In the pre-conference interim the tendency organizing
nucleus assumes political and organizational responsibility
for the prior international resolutions, declarations, open
letters and agreements for common work of its present
constituent groups. These documents notably include:
"Toward Rebirth of the Fourth International," 14 June
1963; Statement to the 3rd Conference of the International
Committee, 6 April 1966; Letter to the OCR FI and French
OCI, 15 January 1973; Letter to Samarakkody. 27 October
1973; the historical analyses: "Genesis of Pabloism,"
"Development of the Spartacist League [of New Zealand],"
and "The Struggle for Trotskyism in Ceylon"; and the
agreements endorsed at the interim international confer-
ence held in Germany in January 1974, printed in IVorkers
Vanguard No. 39, I March 1974.

8. Both the present "United Secretariat" and the former
"International Committee" despite their respective preten-
sions "to be" the Fourth International, as a necessary

SPRING 1977

3

condition for their fake "unities," have chronically mocked
the principles of internationalism and of Bolshevik
democratic centralism as their different national groups or
nationally-based factions have gone their own way—
ultimately in response to the pressures of their own ruling
classes. Thus until the English and French components of
the ex-"International Committee" blew apart, the Interna-
tional Committee operated explicitly on the proposition
that "the only method of arriving at decisions that remains
possible at present is the principle of unanimity" (decision
at the 1966 London International Committee Conference).
Since then the Healyites have substituted the naked
Gauleiter/ Fiihrer principle as their mockery of democratic
centralism. The other, OCI-led wing of the ex-IC retained
the contradiction of launching the Organizing Committee
for Reconstruction of the Fourth International which was
supposed to initiate political discussion on the basis of the
1938 Transitional Program, while simultaneously seeking
to build new national sections. Both such hypothetical
sections and the Organizing Committee itself therefore
labored under a basic ambiguity from the outset, but the
Organizing Committee's disintegration into sharply
counterposed elements all of whom swear by the 1938
Program, has left its practice stillborn. Today, following
the just concluded "Tenth Congress" of the United
Secretariat, its American supporters, being themselves in
the Minority internationally, threaten their own national
minority, the Internationalist Tendency (which belongs to
the international Majority), by declaring:

"The Socialist Workers Party proclaims its fraternal
solidarity with the Fourth International but is prevented by
reactionary legislation from affiliating to it. All political
activities of members of the SWP are decided upon by the
democratically elected national leadership bodies of the
SWP and by the local and branch units of the party.
Unconditional acceptance of the authority of these SWP
bodies is a prerequisite of membership. There are no other
bodies whose decisions are binding on the SWP or its
members^ [our emphasis]

— SWP Internal Informational Bulletin No. 4, April
1974, from Introductory Note, 17 April 1974

9. This apparently naked assertion of national indepen-
dence by or toward organizations in the United States is
not unique and has a specific history. Thus the American
Healyite publicist, Wohlforth, declares in his pamphlet,
"Revisionism in Crisis":

"With the passing of the Voorhis Act in 1940 the SWP was
barred from membership in the Fourth International by law.
Ever since that time the SWP has not been able to be an
affiliate of the Fourth International. So today its relationship
to the United Secretariat is one of political solidarity just as
the Workers' League stands in political solidarity with the
International Committee."

The "Voorhis Act" passed by the American Congress in
1940 has been used as a convenient excuse for revisionists
to more openly display their concrete anti-internationalism
than is convenient for their co-thinkers elsewhere.

This act, while ostensibly aimed centrally at domestic
military conspiracies directed by foreign powers, was
actually intended, as was the overlapping "Smith Act," to
harass the American Communist Party, then supporting
the Hitler-Stalin Pact. A key provision states: "An
organization is subject to foreign control if . . . its policies or
any of them are determined by or at the suggestion of ... an
international political organization" (political activity

being defined as that aimed at the forcible control or
overthrow of the government). Such organizations were to
be subject to such massive and repetitive "registration"
requirements as to paralyze them, quite aside from the
impermissible nature of many of the disclosures demanded.
Thus it was similar to the later "Communist Control Act"
which was successfully fought by the American CP. But the
"Voorhis Act" with its patently unconstitutional and
contradictory provisions has never been used by the
government — only the revisionists.

10. Today the United Secretariat Majority makes loud
cries in favor of international unity and discipline i.e.,
against the S WP's views and conduct, but it was not always
so. When the forerunner of the Spartacist League tried to
appeal its expulsion from the SWP to the United
Secretariat, Pierre Frank wrote for the United Secretariat
on 28 May 1965 that:

"In reply to your letter of May 18 we call your attention first
of all to the fact that the Fourth International has no
organizational connection with the Socialist Workers party
and consequently has no jurisdiction in a problem such as
you raise; namely, the application of democratic centralism
as it affects the organization either as a whole or in individual
instances."

After Frank gave the Spartacists his answer, Healy
publicly expressed sympathy for the Spartacists' plight,
charging in his Newsletter of 16 June 1965 that Frank
"ducks behind a legal formula for cover." But when Healy's
own ox was gored by the SWP's publication of the
embarrassing pamphlet "Healy 'Reconstructs' the Fourth
International," Healy's SLL threatened violence and/ or
legal action ("Political Committee Statement," 20 August
1966 Newsletter) against any who circulated the pamphlet
in his England. Shortly he used both — the Tate affair!
Healy claimed as the basis for his threats the self-same fear
of the Voorhis Act on behalf of Wohlforth and the
Spartacists. But the Spartacist then replied:

"We for our part reject the SLL's solicitousness on our
behalf The Voorhis Act is a paper tiger — never used against
anyone and patently unconstitutional. For the Justice
Department to start proceedings against a small group like-
ours or the smaller and less threatening [Wohlforthite] ACFI
would make the government a laughing stock, and Healy
knows this. He is aware that for years the SWP has hidden
behind this very act to defend its own federalist idea of an
International."

—Spartacist No. 7, September-October 1966

11. More currently, however, as in the United
Secretariat Majority's "Again and Always, the Question of
the International" (by Alain Krivine and the self-same
Pierre Frank, 10 June 197 1, SWP International Informa-
tion Bulletin No. 5, July 197 1) they attack the public
formulation by Jack Barnes, SWP National Secretary, that
"the principal condition for international organization" is
"collaboration between leaderships. .. in every country."
To this idea Krivine and Frank counterpose "the Interna-
tional, a world party based on democratic centralism." And *
later the Majority Tendency (in IIDB Volume X, No. 20,
October 1973) notes that the Minority, in flagrant
contradiction to Barnes' and Hansen's previously ex-
pressed views, declares, "we will do our utmost to construct

a strong [international] center," and the Majority con-
cludes that "actual practice leaves no doubt: the [Minority]

continued on next page

4

SPARTACIST

Declaration for the
Organizing of an
International Trotskyist
Tendency...

faction would be for a 'strong center' if it were able to have a
majority in it." And most recently the same United
Secretariat Majority asserts that behind the acts of the
SWP-based Minority "lies a federalist conception of the
International which contradicts the statutes and the line
adopted by the [Tenth] World Congress" (17 March 1974,
IIDB Volume XI, No. 5, April 1974). The United
Secretariat Majority ought to know. They made this
accusation in commenting on a Tenth Congress joint
Minority-Majority agreement so flagrant in mutually
amnestying every sort of indiscipline, public attack and
disavowal, organizational chicanery, walkout and expul-
sion that the Majority also had to offer the feeble
disclaimer that these "compromises adopted at this World
Congress should in no way be taken as precedents" and that
"the exceptional character of these measures is demonstrat-
ed, moreover, by the unanimous adoption of our new
statutes" (which formally contradict the real practice!). Yes
indeed, for opportunists and revisionists basic organiza-
tional principles are not of centralized, comradely, even-
handed and consistent practice but just boil down to the
simple matter of whose ox is gored. This is the organiza-
tional aspect of Pabloism.

If today the United Secretariat promises to back up its
own friends in the SWP should action be taken against
them, the point to be made is not the United Secretariat's
dishonesty and hypocrisy per se, but rather the shattering
of the United Secretariat's pretensions (like those of the
International Committee) to be the Fourth International.
They both trim their avowed organizational principles
through expediency for petty advantage just as and because
they do the same with their political principles and
program.

12. The international Spartacist tendency is just that,
a tendency in the process of consolidation. But from
its international outset it declares its continuing fidel-
ity already tested for a decade in national confines to
Marxist-Leninist principle and Trotskyist program —

Revolutionary, Internationalist and Proletarian.

The struggle for the rebirth of the Fourth
International promises to be difficult, long, and, above all,
uneven. But it is an indispensable and central task facing
those who would win proletarian power and thus open the
road, to the achievement of socialism for humanity. The
struggle begun by L.D. Trotsky in 1929 to constitute an
International Left Opposition must be studied. Both
despite and because of the differing objective and
subjective particulars and with ultimately common basis
then and now there is much to be learned especially as to
the testing and selection of cadres in the course of the
vicissitudes of social and internal struggles.

The giant figure of Trotsky attracted around itself all
sorts of personally and programmatically unstable ele-
ments repelled by the degenerating Comintern. This led,
together with demoralization from the succession of
working-class defeats culminating in the second World
War, to a prolonged and not always successful sorting out
process. It is a small compensation for the lack of a Trotsky
that the Spartacist tendency has little extraneous, symbolic
drawing power at the outset. But a decade of largely
localized experience shows no lack of weak or accidental
elements drawn temporarily to the tendency. The only real
test is in hard-driving, all-sided involvement in living class
struggle.

As L. D. Trotsky noted in "At the Fresh Grave of Kote
Tsintsadze," 7 January 1931:

"It took altogether extraordinary conditions like czarism,
illegality, prison, and deportation, many years of struggle
against the Mensheviks, and especially the experience of

three revolutions to produce fighters like Kote Tsintsadze

"The Communist parties in the West have not yet brought up
fighters of Tsintsadze's type. This is their besetting weakness,
determined by historical reasons but nonetheless a weakness.
The Left Opposition in the Western countries is not an
exception in this respect and it must well take note of it."

Central Committee, SL/ANZ
Central Committee, SL/U.S.

[ This draft agreed to by the Political Bureau of the SLj U. S.
and a representative of the Central Committee of the
SL/ANZ, 22 May 1974; accepted by the Central Commit-
tee, SL/ANZ, 7 June 1974; declared to be in force,
following concurrence with it at the European summer
camp of the international Spartacist tendency, 6 July
1974.]

SPARTACIST

An Organ of Revolutionary Marxism

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ORDER FROM/PAY TO:
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SPRING 1977 5

Letter to the Spanish Liga
Comunista

In June 1975 the international Spartacist tendency (iSt)
sent the following letter to the Liga Comunista de Espana
(LCE), a Spanish sympathizing section of the "United
Secretariat of the Fourth International" (USec). The letter
had been prompted by an invitation from a member of the
LCE's political bureau, at a meeting in February, to initiate
organization-to-organization written discussion. No reply
was ever received, and in the interim the LCE's politics
have considerably changed. Nevertheless, the document
retains its value as a polemic directed at left-leaning
elements within the USec.

The Liga had aligned itself with the misnamed Leninist-
Trotskyist Faction (LTF) of the USec on the basis of the
pseudo-orthodox phraseology which LTF leaders — the
American Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the
Argentine Partido Socialista de los Trabajadores (PST) —
found useful in polemicizing against Ernest Mandel's
International Majority Tendency (IMT). The reformist
SWP and PST were deeply mired in class collaborationism
on their own national terrains while abstractly criticizing
the popular-frontism of the IMT abroad. However, at this
time the LCE not only vigorously criticized the French
Mandelites for refusing to characterize the Union of the
Left as a popular front, but also attacked the other Spanish
USec sympathizing section — the Liga Comunista Revolu-
cionaria (LCR) — for practicing popular-frontism at home
where pressures for capitulation were strongest.

The LCE was not the only group in the USec orbit which
was taken in by the LTF's false appeal to orthodoxy. In the
French Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire, the hetero-
geneous Tendency 4 included both committed supporters
of the LTF — whose politics placed them to the right of the
centrist IMT — and would-be left opponents of the Krivine
leadership. In Portugal, the Partido Revolucionario dos
Trabalhadores (PRT) — at that time not formally affiliated
to the USec, but politically close to the Spanish LCE —
opposed giving political support to the bonapartist Armed
Forces Movement (MFA), while the IMT-linked Liga
Comunista Internacionalista was appealing to the "pro-
gressive officers" of the MFA.

Since this letter was written the LTF has split down the
middle, with the PST setting up a third faction in the USec,
the Bolshevik Tendency. This led to a three-way split in the
Spanish LCE, with some elements joining the LCR, a
group of PST supporters splitting to set up the Liga
Socialista Revolucionaria, and the remainder coming
firmly under the thumb of the SWP.

Events in Portugal during the summer of 1975, and the
debate they touched off inside the USec, represented a key
turning point for the LCE. Its articles on Portugal in 1974
and early 1975 heavily emphasized opposition to popular-
frontism. In Comhate No. 23 (July 1974), the LCE wrote:

"...this confrontation between the popuiar-frontist policies
of the Stalinist leaderships and the line of workers united
front which the Trotskyists have always upheld transcends
the French presidential elections and the formation of the

provisional government in Portugal. This is the central
strategic question which is put in quite concrete terms before
the European workers movement." [our emphasis]

No more. Today the LCE says the central issue in Portugal
is "the struggle for democracy"!

In the summer of 1975 the Portuguese Socialist Party of
Mario Soares spearheaded an anti-communist mobiliza-
tion in the name of (bourgeois) "democracy," dragging in
its wake the ostensible Trotskyists of the American SWP
and the French Organisation Communiste Internationa-
liste. First, on the Republica affair (see "Fight MFA
Suppression of Left Media in Portugal!" Workers
Vanguardno. 83,31 October 1975) the SWP went beyond
defense of freedom of the press to politically support
Soares against the printers who had carried out a takeover
of the pro-Socialist Party newspaper. Then, when Soares
launched a drive against the Gon^alves government —
attacking it for tolerating "anarcho-populism," demanding
that workers militias be disarmed and embryonic organs of
dual power crushed, justifying the actions of reactionary
mobs who burned down Communist Party headquarters —
the SWP declared that, "The Socialist Party has more and
more become the rallying ground for forces in the workers
movement that refuse to bow to the Stalinists."

In August of that year, while flames were leaping from
Communist Party offices across northern Portugal, the
steering committee of the "Leninist-Trotskyist Faction"
met to discuss a draft document drawn up by the SWP
leadership on "The Key Issues in the Portuguese Revolu-
tion." The theoretical guru of the PST, Nahuel Moreno,
had written to SWP leader Joseph Hansen expressing a
number of disagreements with the latter's analysis of
Portugal. Hansen replied (letter of 9 August 1975) that, "It
appears to me that the main axis of the Trotskyist political
course [in Portugal] must be defense of the democratic
conquests" ([SWP] International Internal Discussion
Bulletin, January 1976).

In the discussions at the LTF steering committee it was
not the PST delegates who most sharply criticized the
SWP's draft, but the Spanish LCE. A statement by the
political bureau of the LCE ("Concerning the Draft
Resolution on Portugal") criticized the draft for not
characterizing the government as a popular front and
pointed to its "one-sided" characterization of the Socialist
Party: ". . . there is no clear analysis and confirmation of the
counterrevolutionary nature of its political line." The LCE
critique concludes:

"We cannot limit ourselves to centering the program
exclusively on defense of democratic rights, though at a given
concrete moment this could be the axis.
"On the other hand, we should emphasize the need for a
concrete program to develop, transform and consolidate the
[workers] committees and commissions which is one of the
central tasks for advancing the class independence of the
mass movements.

"Finally, it is necessary to indicate clearly the central role
continued on next page

6

SPARTACIST

Liga Comunista...

played by a governmental slogan as the expression of class
independence and the need to break with the bourgeoisie — "
Rather than fighting out these differences, however,
both PST and LCE representatives voted for the SWP
draft with the understanding that the final version would be
edited in light of their criticisms. Nothing of the sort
happened. The SWP-edited version was published with the
"democratic rights" axis intact and the apologetics for
Soares unchanged.

Moreno broke with the SWP over this document,
although he was hard-put to explain his support for earlier
LTF positions in the same tenor. (He didn't even try to
harmonize his new-found leftist verbiage with the PSTs
own shameful declarations of support for the "institutional
process" in Argentina against left-wing guerrillas!) But the
LCE leadership capitulated miserably. The declaration of
the PST's Bolshevik Tendency documents this:

"The SWP's positions on Portugal were resisted from the
beginning by 90 percent of the faction, which in criticizing the
draft Key Issues demanded that the issue of the organs of
power be posed. The clearest and most brilliant opposition
came from the leadership of the Spanish LTF — For
obscure reasons that escape us, the Spanish leadership of the
ITF capitulated completely to the SWP and accepted the
second version of Key /.wu«. . .which says practically the
same as the former. This provoked a crisis in the faction in
Spain "

[SWP] Iniernational Internal Discussion Bulletin,
January 1977

This pitiful right turn by the LCE leadership on Portugal
was soon manifested in its political positions on domestic
issues as well, where it took over the SWP's reformist
recipes lock, stock and barrel. Tailing Soares in Portugal, it
was only logical that the LCE should crawl after Spanish
social-democratic leader Felipe Gonzalez at home.

In the past the LCE had insisted on unconditional
submission to the discipline of the Stahnist-dominated
workers commissions (CC.OO.), sharply criticizing the
LCR for seeking to go around the CC.OO. at the height of
the 1973 Pamplona strike movement, for instance. But in
late 1976 the LCE switched horses, abruptly exiting from
the CC.OO., charging suppression of democratic rights by
the Communist Party (which had always been the case)
and joining up with the social-democratic UGT union
federation. However, in doing so it remained true to its
tailist conceptions of "strategic unity" with the reformist
misleaders, as indicated in the following statement by LCE-
supported trade unionists on joining the UGT:

"We accept the statutes and decisions of the UGT congress
and we are not going to struggle to destroy it. Rather we will
strengthen the UGT and be a sector of its left wing which
fights for unity and for the socialist society."
Camhio 16. 18 October 1976

We are unable, with the limited material at our disposal,
to make a comprehensive critique of the LCE's policy in
Spain today. But with its pitiful capitulation before Soares
and adoption of the SWP's social-democratic policies in
tola, any remaining subjectively revolutionary impulses of
its membership can only end in frustration. The road to a
revolutionary policy in Spain today requires openly
rejecting and combatting the LCE's undisguised anti-
Trotskyist revisionism.

6 June 1975
Dear Comrades,

We gladly accept the invitation by Comrade M. to
initiate correspondence between the international Sparta-
cist tendency and the LCE. We must make clear, however,
that we are not familiar with your political views on a whole
range of important subjects. Thus a main purpose of this
letter is to determine whether a basis for organization-to-
organization discussions exists.

It should be explained at the outset why we take this
opportunity seriously. The LCE appears to us to be one of
the subjectively most serious and leftist groups in the
swamp that goes by the name of the "United Secretariat."
And unlike the petty-bourgeois radicals of the Internation-
al Majority Tendency (IMT), your organization seems to
be attracted by the (fraudulent) appeal to Marxist
orthodoxy of the misnamed "Leninist-Trotskyist Faction"
(LTF).

But no communist can feel anything but utter contempt
for your international bloc partners, the consummate
reformists of the American Socialist Workers Party and
the Argentine Partido Socialista de los Trabajadores! The
SWP and PST are sworn enemies of proletarian revolu-
tion: behind the quotations from Lenin and Trotsky they
use to refute IMT guerrillaism lies a cringing fear of
angering their own bourgeoisies.

We detect an important difference between the LCE and
the SWP/ PST, however. The latter are simply cynical
impostors who roundly condemn the popular-frontist
policies of the IMT, then turn around and practice even
more shameless class collaboration in their national
habitats. In contrast, the Liga Comunista has vigorously
denounced popular frontism at home as well as when
perpetrated by factional opponents abroad.

While in no sense underrating this significant distinction,
we must also take seriously the fact that the LCE is a
sympathizing organization of the "United Secretariat of
the Fourth International" [USec], which is neither united
nor the Fourth International; and is a member of the
"Leninist-Trotskyist Faction," which is neither Leninist
nor Trotskyist nor, for that matter, a faction. The Liga
Comunista thereby appears before the Spanish proletariat
as a supporter of a fake "International" whose other local
affiliate, the Liga Comunista Revolucionaria (LCR), is
incapable of drawing a class line against popular frontism
and could even enter at any moment into the popular front
Assembly of Catalonia. You must likewise take responsi-
bility for disgusting betrayals of socialist principle by the
SWP and PST.

To take two of the most recent notorious examples, you
are certainly well aware of the declarations by the PST
which in effect give "critical support" to the murderous
Peronist regime in Argentina, and of the SWP's call for
federal troops to Boston. We do not know of any statement
by the LCE against these treacherous expressions of
confidence in the capitalist state by leaders of the LTF. It
would be foolish to hope for serious organization-to-
organization discussions without a condemnation by the
Liga Comunista of the SWP's call for federal troops and
the PST's support for the "continuity" of the Argentine

SPRING 1977

7

government. And it is obvious that for any serious
revolutionary such a condemnation would require a break
with the politics of the LTF.

Such a break cannot be accomplished with a few strokes
of the pen. What is needed is a serious investigation of the
real politics of the SWP and PST, and a frank evaluation of
the causes of the LCE's errors. We know that in the past
leaders of the Liga Comunista have sought to seriously re-
examine some of their past positions. When a representa-
tive of the IMT sought to drop the LCR's previous ultra-
left policy toward the workers commissions, the
Encrucijada tendency insisted on a political discussion of
the origins of this policy. Will you show the same
determination now? With hundreds of leftist militants
arrested by and assassinated with the connivance of the
government whose "continuity" is supported by Coral &
Co., half-hearted "criticisms" of certain "formulations" by
the PST are not enough!

Why is the Liga Comunista aligned with the LTF in the
first place? At present we lack the information to answer
this question. In the event, however, that you have taken
seriously the occasionally orthodox-sounding verbiage of
Joe Hansen's factional documents, and that you are not
fully familiar with the actual practice of the SWP and PST,
one aim of this letter is to demonstrate the total fraudulence
of any pretense to Trotskyism by these charlatans and
expose the origins of their opportunist policies: Pabloism.
(The LCE's concept of a united front "strategy" is also
taken up.)

A Social Democrat and a Chameleon

Statements by the PST during the last 15 months
have been so openly class-collaborationist that one would
have to be blind not to see the gulf that separates these
reformist social democrats from revolutionary Trotskyism.
In a joint declaration with the CP and six bourgeois parties
presented to General Peron on 21 March, 1974, the PST
promised to adhere to "the institutional process" and
condemned all those (e.g., communists) who seek to change
it. This statement unambiguously supports capitalist "law
and order," at least implicitly siding with the government
and liberal bourgeois parties against leftist guerrillas such
as the ERP/PRT [Ejercito Revolucionario del
Pueblo/ Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores].

The implication was made explicit in a statement by PST
leader Juan Carlos Coral to the "multi-sectorial" meeting
with President Isabel Peron on October 8, where that
phony socialist declared the guerrillas to be a "mirror-
image" of the rightist death squads (AAA). Coral's speech
included a statement which can only be interpreted as a
declaration of political support for the Peronist regime:
"we will fight for the continuity of this government," said
the representative of the "Trotskyist" PST {Avanzada
Socialista, 15 October 1974)!

These statements conciliating the Peronist government
are nothing new. The PST's "theoretician" Nahuel Moreno
has been playing this game for decades, for a dozen years
with the toleration of the United Secretariat. The facts are
no secret, and we have dealt with them at length in an
article ("Argentina: The Struggle Against Peronism,"
Workers VanguardNo. 24, 6 July 1973) which is attached.
Suffice it to say that during the late 1950's and early 1960's
Moreno put out the magazine Palabra Obrera, which

called itself the "organ of revolutionary workers Peronism"
and claimed to be issued "under the discipline of General
Peron and the Peronist Supreme Council"! More recently.
Coral/ Moreno offered to vote for the Peronist slate if 80
percent of Justicialista candidates were workers (AS, 22
November 1972) and told Peronist President Hector
Campora he could "count on our proletarian solidarity"
(AS, 30 May-6 June 1973).

So if today the PST capitulates to the Peron
government, you can not blame this on misformulations or
an alleged recent turn. Nor are these betrayals solely the
responsibility of Coral (who is merely the social democrat
he always has been) and Moreno (a political chameleon
who is just doing what comes naturally). To fight for the
Marxist principle of working-class independence it is
necessary to break with Hansen and Mandel who for years
gave a "left" cover to Moreno's machinations.

For example: Moreno and Hansen now bitterly attack
the IMT's Guevarism, but in the early and mid-1960's they
wholeheartedly supported peasant guerrilla war, at least on
paper. Moreno was at this time the most guerrillaist of
them all. "History ... has rejected the theory that the
proletariat, in the backward countries, is the revolutionary
leadership," he wrote in 1961, thereby throwing the
Transitional Program and the theory of permanent
revolution out the window. It is necessary to "synthesize
the correct general theory and program (Trotskyist) with
the correct particular theory and program (Mao Tse-
tungist or Castroist)," he added (N. Moreno, La revolucion
latinoamericana).

If a wing of the Partido Revolucionario de los
Trabajadores (PRT), a section of the United Secretariat
founded and "educated" by Moreno, was subsequently to
undertake urban and rural guerrilla warfare, hailing "our
main Comandante, Che Guevara" and welcoming "the
contributions that Trotsky, Kim II Sung, Mao Tse-tung,
Ho Chi Minh and General Giap have made for the
revolution" (Roberto Santucho, quoted in Intercontinent-
al Press, 27 November 1972), the cause is not to be sought
in the Latin American resolution of the "Ninth World
Congress." Hansen and Moreno are just as responsible as
Mandel, just a bit more "cautious" when putting their
words into practice.

Do you wish to go to the origins of petty-bourgeois
guerrillaism in the United Secretariat? If so, you must reject
the very founding document of the USec, "For Early
Reunification of the World Trotskyist Movement" (written
by the SWP majority in March 1963), which stated that
"guerrilla warfare conducted by landless peasants and
semi-proletarian forces, under a leadership that becomes
committed to carrying the revolution through to a
conclusion, can play a decisive role in undermining and
precipitating the downfall of a colonial and semi-colonial
power." The Revolutionary Tendency of the SWP,
forerunner of the Spartacist League/ U.S., replied:
"peasant-based guerrilla warfare under petit-bourgeois
leadership can in itself lead to nothing more than an anti-
working-class bureaucratic regime Colonial revolution

can have an unequivocally progressive revolutionary
significance only under such [Marxist] leadership of the
revolutionary proletariat" ("Toward the Rebirth of the
continued on next page

8

SPARTACIST

Liga Comunista...

Fourth lnternational," June 1963). Hansen's opposition to
guerrillaism is a phony!

Not an International But a Non-Aggression Pact

Thus the very founding of the United Secretariat
was based on rejection of the theory of permanent
revolution and the indispensable leading role of the
working class under its Trotskyist vanguard party. For the
patriarchs of the former International Secretariat (Ernest
Mandel, Livio Maitan, Pierre Frank) this was simply a
continuation of the Pabloist liquidationism they had been
expounding since the early 1950's. From Pablo's "deep
entry" into the Stalinist parties to the U See's cheerleading
for Castro, these professional capitulators have apologized
for one non-proletarian misleader after another.

The SWP resisted Pablo's program of liquidating into
the reformist parties in the 1950's, albeit after considerable
hesitation. But following the ravages of McCarthyism
against the U.S. left the party increasingly succumbed to
the pressures of isolation. When the Cuban Revolution
came along, Hansen declared the new regime to be a
healthy workers state ("although lacking the forms of
workers democracy"!) thereby hoping to bask in its
popularity. Only the Revolutionary Tendency took the
position that Cuba was a qualitatively deformed workers
state, that an independent Trotskyist party was necessary
to lead a political revolution ousting the Stalinist bureauc-
racy and instituting democratic soviet rule. The six-
year-old crisis in the "United" Secretariat is a direct result
of its Pabloist policies. Not only was there no "turn" at the
Ninth Congress (except to play at putting into practice the
hitherto exclusively verbal guerrillaism), but if "uncon-
scious Marxists" (Castro) can replace the Trotskyists and
"blunted instruments" (peasant guerrilla bands) can
accomplish the tasks of the Leninist party, then why
shouldn't all manner of social-democratic, semi-Maoist
and Guevarist elements be included in "the International"?

Such a federated rotten bloc of widely disparate forces is
organically incapable of achieving Marxist clarity or
coherent revolutionary action, as the USec has amply
demonstrated. What is the "United" Secretariat's position
on Chile, for instance? The SWP says Allende's Popular
Unity coalition was a popular front, but the IMT and PST
deny this. Indochina? The IMT considers the Vietnamese
Stalinists to be revolutionaries who havejust accomplished
"the first victorious 'permanent revolution'" since Cuba,
while the SWP refused to take sides in the class war in
Indochina and currently holds that South Vietnam is still
capitalist!

What of the Portuguese Armed Forces Movement, the
French Union of the Left, the Chinese "Cultural Revolu-
tion," guerrilla warfare, individual terrorism? On none of
these vital issues is there a common USec position, and in
line with its Menshevik conception of democratic central-
ism the opposing policies are duly published in the press of
the respective sections. No wonder, then, that everywhere
there are substantial numbers of LTF and IMT supporters
in the same country there have been splits or separate
organizations (Argentina, Australia, Canada, Mexico,
Peru, Portugal and the U.S.).

Already at the founding of the USec in 1963 its character
as an unprincipled non-aggression pact was demonstrated
by sweeping under the rug important differences on the
1953 split, China and other topics. Another element of the
bogus "reunification" was a tacit agreement not to
denounce each other's betrayals, in order to maintain
"unity." In a recent public factional polemic against the
USec majority, the PST captured this point nicely. Why, it
asked, does Mandel attack the PST for making joint
declarations with bourgeois politicians vet remain silent
about the SWP's "antiwar" coalitions with prominent
liberal Democrats?

"We should like to remind them [the IMT leadership] that at
the height of the antiwar movement in the United States,
quite a few petty bourgeois and even bourgeois figures
sought to share the platform in the giant rallies that were
staged at the time. The Trotskyists in the United States did
not oppose this. In fact they favored it.
"But how the ultralefts screamed! They considered this to be
proof positive that the Socialist Workers party had formed
an 'interclass political bloc' with the liberal wing of the
Democratic party, thereby falling into the Social Democratic
'policy' of class coUaborationism. It is one of the main
'proofs' still thrown at the SWP by the ultralefts in the United
States (and elsewhere) to bolster the charge that the SWP has
'degenerated,' turned 'reformist.' and 'betrayed' the working
class."

— Intercontinental Press, 20 January 1975
The "ultra-lefts" who denounced the SWP's class-
collaborationist antiwar coalitions were, of course, the
Spartacist League, and the PST leaders make an important
point in demonstrating the IMT's inconsistency. But
Mandel well understands that to accuse the SWP of class
coUaborationism in its main area of work for half a decade
means irrevocably splitting the USec down the middle and
destroying its claim to be the Fourth International.

Class Collaboration and the Antiwar Movement

The Socialist Workers Party policy in the antiwar
movement of the late I960's is, in fact, a classic example of
its reformist policies. "Single-issue" coalition-building
against the Vietnam war dominated the activities of the
SWP from 1965 to 1971 and won most of the party's
present membership. It was in this school of class
collaboration that they were educated, and we can assure
you that even among reformist Maoists and pro-Moscow
Stalinists the SWP was notorious as the most right-wing
"socialist" element in the antiwar movement. The Maoists
called for victory of the N LF (at least until the 1 973 "peace"
accords), but the SWP consistently refused to take sides in
the class war raging in Indochina (claiming the issue was
solely self-determination). Even the CPUSA was able to
posture to the left of the SWP, by seeking to build multi-
issue coalitions (most notably the "People's Coalition for
Peace and Justice"). The SWP attacked them as "sectari-
an" since they would scare off potential opponents of the
war who disagreed on other points.

The essence of the SWP's antiwar "strategy" was
expressed in a 22 November 1965 Militant article which
called for "put[ting] aside sectarian differences to unite and
help build a national organization which can encompass
anyone willing to oppose U.S. involvement in Vietnam,
regardless of their commitment, or lack of it, on other
questions." What Hansen & Co. sought was a common

SPRING 1977

9

organization with bourgeois antiwar groups and liberal
capitalist politicians who, understandably, "lack commit-
ment" to wage a working-class struggle against the war.

This did not simply remain on paper as unrealized
opportunist appetites. As early as the autumn of 1965 the
SWP acted as a broker to cement the "Fifth Avenue Peace
Parade Committee," formed around a single slogan, "Stop
the War Now!" and a caH fur tiie removal of "all foreign
troops" from South Vietnam. This not only endorsed the
U.S. government position condemning "North Vietnamese
aggression," but avoided the fundamental obligation of
proletarian solidarity, namely to call for victory to the
Vietnamese revolution.

A similar class-collaborationist formation was the
National Peace Action Coalition (NPAC) set up by the
SWP in the late 1960's. Far from being an ad hoc bloc for
the purpose of holding a demonstration, the SWP-
dominated NPAC was an ongoing organization with a
distinct political line and a board including Democratic
Senator Vance Hartke. Even before Hartke's participation,
however, NPAC's popular-front character was demon-
strated by its refusal to raise any demand beyond "Out
Now!" and its policy of building rallies which focused on
bourgeois politicians (Hartke, IVIayor John Lindsay,
Senators George McGovern and Eugene McCarthy, etc.).
It was no accident that every election year (1966, 1968,
1970, 1972), when Democratic Party "peace" candidates
would mount their campaigns, the "independent" mass
antiwar movement would simply disappear. And the
SWP's refusal to call for solidarity with the Indochinese
revolution guaranteed that NPAC would disintegrate as
soon as large-scale withdrawal of U.S. troops began.

In contrast, the Spartacist League fought against the
U.S.'s imperialist war on a class basis. Our demands
included "no liberal bourgeois speakers at antiwar rallies,"
"labor political strikes against the war," "break with the
Democrats and Republicans — form a workers party,"
"smash imperialism — all U.S. troops out of Asia now," and
"victory to the Indochinese revolution — no confidence in
sellout 'leaders' at home or abroad." One demand which
invariably aroused the ire of the SWP "marshals" at all the
demonstrations was "All Indochina Must Go
Communist."

Our policy was entirely consonant with the Leninist
program that imperialist war can only be fought by
revolutionary class struggle. Commenting on the Zimmer-
wald conference Lenin referred to "the fundamental idea of
our resolution that a struggle for peace without a
revolutionary struggle is but an empty and false phrase,
that the only way to put an end to the horrors of war is by a
revolutionary struggle for socialism" ("The First Step,"
October 1915). But you will look in vain in the SWP's
extensive articles on the Vietnam war and in numerous
NPAC demonstrations and meetings for even a breath of
revolutionary class struggle.

There is an important parallel here to the antiwar
coalitions of the CPUSA in the 1930's. In an SWP
pamphlet entitled, "The People's Front: The New Betray-
al," James Burnham wrote in 1937:

"Most significant of all is the application of the People's
Front policy to 'anti-war work." Through a multitude of
pacifist organizations, and especially through the directly
controlled American League against War and Fascism, the

Stalinists aim at the creation of a 'broad, classless, Peoples'
Front of all those opposed to war.' The class collaborationist
character of the Peoples' Front policy is strikingly revealed
through the Stalinist attitude in these organizations. They
rule out in advance the Marxist analysis of war as necessarily
resulting from the inner conflicts of capitalism and therefore
genuinely opposed only by revolutionary class struggle
against the capitalist order; and, in contrast, maintain that all
persons, from whatever social class or group, whether or not
opposed to capitalism can 'unite' to stop war."

This is a letter-perfect description of the SWP's action in
NPAC.

The most dramatic expression of the popular-front
character of N P AC came at its July 1 97 1 conference in New
York City. The meeting was attended by Senator Hartke
and by Victor Reuther, a vice president of the United Auto
Workers who was involved in channeling CIA funds to
anti-communist unionists in Europe after World War II. A
Spartacist League motion called for the exclusion of
bourgeois politicians like Hartke from the conference; the
SWP chairman refused to vote the motion. Later, when
Hartke and Reuther spoke they were heckled by supporters
of the Spartacist League and Progressive Labor. The SWP
then mobilized its marshals and charged the protesters,
injuring several of them with vicious beatings. The next day
SL and PL supporters were excluded from the conference
(see "SWP Seals Alliance with Bourgeoisie," Workers'
Action No. 10, September 1971). Unity with the bosses,
exclude the communists — this was the SWP's "independ-
ent" antiwar policy!

These fake Trotskyists call for and built organizations
encompassing "anyone willing to oppose U.S. involvement
in Vietnam, regardless of their commitment ... on other
questions." We ask you: what would the LCE term an
organization composed of all those, regardless of class,
who oppose the Franco dictatorship? And what would you
say of those who created such a coalition? Your answer in
Spain is clear: you call the Assembly of Catalonia a popular
front (or the embryo of a popular front) and condemn the
class collaborationism of the Stalinists who build it. What
do you say about the U.S.?

Federal Troops or Labor/Black Defense?

We could go on at length concerning the SWP's anti-
Marxist practice in every arena: sectoralism (separate
parties for blacks, Chicanos; "self-determination" for
everyone including Indians, homosexuals, women, etc.);
support for the labor bureaucracy against "disruptive"
rank-and-file militants; blocs with bourgeois feminists in
the women's liberation movement (and consequent refusal
to raise the demand for free abortion); open support for
, strikebreaking (in the 1968 New York City teachers
strikes); calls for "community control" (even of the police);
boundless electoral cretinism, etc.

During recent months the SWP has ever more openly
stated its social-democratic aspirations. In December 1974,
in order to convince a liberal judge that there was no need
for FBI surveillance of its youth group, an official SWP
brief to the court declared that the party categorically
renounced "violence or any other illegal activity." Shortly
afterwards the SWP launched its "'76 Presidential Drive"
with a "Bill of Rights for working people," a reformist

continued on next page

10

SPARTACIST

Liga Comunista. . .

gimmick which essentially calls for reforming capitalism
out of existence by constitutional amendment!

Then, in an interview with the New York Times (2 1 April
1975), SWP presidential candidate Peter Camejo called for
"cutting the war budget" (i.e., not eliminating it), "ending
illegal activity of C.I. A. and F.B.I, harassment" (i.e., not
touching the legal activities of these anti-communist special
police), and "opposition to the present foreign policy,
which we characterize as imperialist" (thus spreading the
reformist illusion that imperialism could be eliminated by
voting in peace-loving statesmen)! Not one of the five
demands mentioned by Camejo included anything that has
not already been raised by left-liberal Democratic
congressmen.

But in the last year the struggle between the Marxist
program of working-class independence and reformist
class collaborationism has come to a head over a very
specific issue: the SWF's call for "Federal Troops to
Boston." During the course of a reactionary mobilization
against school desegregation through court-ordered
busing, there have been a number of racist lynch-mob
attacks on black school children in Boston. So, good
reformists that they are, the SWP appeals to the armed
forces of the capitalist state — the butchers of Indochina —
to protect black people!

Revolutionaries warn the working masses to place no
confidence in the bourgeois state, pointing out that it
defends the interests of the capitalist ruling class and not
those of the exploited and oppressed. While it is perfectly
correct to call for the enforcement of a law supporting
democratic rights (in fact the Spartacist League was among
the first to call for implementing the court-ordered busing
plan), to call for the intervention of federal troops
expresses confidence that they will defend the interests of
the oppressed black minority. Marxists call instead for the
working masses to rely on their own forces, and warn that if
federal troops intervene in Boston it will be to smash any
attempt at self-defense by the black population.

In Boston the Spartacist League called for the formation

SPARTACIST LEAGUE/U.S.
LOCAL DIRECTORY

BERKELEY/OAKLAND (415) 835-1535

Box 23372, Oakland, CA 94623

Public Office: 1634 Telegraph (3rd floor), Oakland
BOSTON (617) 492-3928

Box 188, M I T. Station, Cambridge, MA 02139
CHICAGO (312) 427-0003

Box 6441, Main P.O., Chicago, IL 60680

Public Office: 650 So. Clark (2nd floor)
CLEVELAND (216) 281-4781

Box 6765, Cleveland, OH 44101
DETROIT (313) 869-1551

Box 663A, GPO, Detroit, Ml 48232
LOS ANGELES (213) 385-1962

Box 26282, Edendale Sta., Los Angeles, CA 90026
NEW YORK (212) 925-2426

Box 1377, GPO, New York, NY 10001

Public Office: 260 W. Broadway, Rm. 522
SAN FRANCISCO (415) 564-2845

Box 5712, San Francisco, CA 94101
\ )

of integrated working-class defense guards ("labor/ black
defense") for the schools, children and black communities
endangered by racist marauders. This Leninist policy
received worldwide press coverage in photos showing our
banners in Boston demonstrations. It has also attracted
support from a number of black militants. The SWF's
response was to denounce our call for an integrated labor
defense force as "ultra-left." "The call for trade-union
defense guards isn't realistic right now," said Camejo in the
Militant (1 November 1974), "...you pull this slogan of
trade-union guards totally out of the blue. It's not a serious
proposal."

Hansen has prettied up SWF policies on the Boston
busing crisis for international consumption in a lengthy
article in Intercontinental Press (25 November 1974) in
which he even labeled the SL call for labor/ black defense
"a commendable stand." This is simply eyewash for the
uninformed. Not once did the SWP ever raise such a
demand in Boston (or anywhere else) during the past year.
On the contrary, at the December 14 demonstration in
Boston, when the SL contingent chanted "No Federal
Troops— Labor /Black Defense!" a nearby SWP contin-
gent began to chant "Federal Troops to Boston!" in an
effort to drown us out.

A sharp line has been drawn over the issue of federal
troops to Boston: the reformist SWP and CP, together with
black Democrats and the liberal Democratic mayor of
Boston, call for the intervention of military forces of the
capitalist state; the Spartacist League calls for independent
working-class action, for labor/ black defense. It is the
internationalist obligation of ostensibly revolutionary
forces to take sides on this issue. To date, however, not one
section of the United Secretariat has publicly opposed the
open revisionism of the SWP on the central issue of the
class character of the state and the attitude of revolutiona-
ries toward it. Where does the LCE stand?

Trotsky, in any case, put forward a revolutionary policy.
He wrote in "War and the Fourth International" (1934):
"To turn to the state, that is, to capital, with the demand to
disarm the fascists means to sow the worst democratic
illusions, to lull the vigilance of the proletariat, to demoralize

its will The Social Democrats, even the most left ones,

that is, those who are ready to repeat general phrases of

INTERNATIONAL SPARTACIST
TENDENCY DIRECTORY

LIGUE TROTSKYSTE DE FRANCE
Pascal Alessandri
B P. 336, 75011 Paris

LONDON SPARTACIST GROUP
BCM Box 4272
London, WC1V 6XX

SPARTACIST LEAGUE OF AUSTRALIA/NEW ZEALAND
GPO Box 3473
Sydney, NSW, 2001, Australia

SPARTACIST LEAGUE/U.S.
Box 1377, GPO
New York, NY 10001

TROTSKYIST LEAGUE OF CANADA
Box 7198. Station A
Toronto, Ontario

TROTZKISTISCHE LIGA DEUTSCHLANDS
Postfach 1 1 0647
1 Berlin 11

v /

SPRING 1977

11

revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, carefully
avoid the question of arming the workers, or openly declare
this task 'chimerical,' 'adventurous,' 'romantic,' etc."

Commenting on this quotation, the Bolshevik-Leninist
Faction (whose leading member was recently expelled from
the central committee of the French Ligue Communiste
Revolutionnaire [LCR]) wrote: "'Romantic' said the left
social democrats in 1933, 'unrealistic' Camejo tells us; the
years pass, but the vocabulary of the social democrats
hardly changes!" {Spartacist [edition frangaise] No. 9, 16
May 1975).

We are enclosing articles from our press which deal with
this controversy over federal troops to Boston. Some of the
most recent ones deal with the "realism" of calling for
labor/ black defense in a concrete manner: by reporting the
formation of a union defense committee to protect the
home of a black member from racist attacks. This action,
by United Auto Workers Local 6 in Chicago, came as the
result of a motion by the Labor Struggle Caucus of that
union, one of whose members heads the defense squad. The
Caucus is a class-struggle opposition grouping politically
supported by the Spartacist League.

United Front: Tactic or Strategy?

We have attempted to study carefully the press of the
Liga Comunista in order to form a considered opinion of
your political positions and practice. We note in the first
place that it is very heavily centered on the Iberian
peninsula, and consequently we are not aware of your
views on a number of important issues (including Cuba,
Ireland, Near East wars, petty-bourgeois nationalism in
various countries). Also, since we only have the first
volume of the resolutions of your second congress, we
would appreciate receiving any additional documents
available.

A large part of Comfta/e and the provincial organs of the
LCE is taken up (correctly) by discussion of workers
struggles and the student arena. Concerning the 1973
general strike in Pamplona, the strike wave in the Bajo
Llobregat in 1974 and other important strikes we have
sought to compare accounts published by the LCE, LCR,
ORT [Organizacion Revolucionaria de los Trabajadores]
and Maoist groups to the extent that they are available to
us. While we have gained impressions, some important
questions are still not clarified for us, and in any case it is
risky to judge particular trade-union struggles from afar.
We would, however, like to comment on your concept of a
strategic united front and, at a general level, its relationship
to the tasks of revolutionaries concerning the workers
commissions.

In your letter to the central committee of the French
Ligue Communiste ("Regarding the Positions Taken by
the Ligue Communiste in the Legislative Elections of
March 1973," June 1973, [SWP] International Internal
Discussion Bulletin No. 5, January 1974), the LCE states:
"To the sell-out leaderships' strategic line of united front
with the bourgeoisie, concretized at this time in a Union of
the Left that is unable to even fight Pompidou, it required
counterposing the revolutionary strategy of the class united
front, able to polarize the oppressed masses of the city and
countryside around the proletariat" (emphasis in original).
The same idea is repeated elsewhere in the documents of the

Liga Comunista in different forms, usually referring to a
"Class Pact" as the alternative "counterposed on all levels"
to the popular front.

As you are well aware, the concept of a "united front
strategy" has been used by the French OCl [Organisation
Communiste Internationaliste] to justify its policy of
tailing after the present reformist leadership of the class.
The most disgusting application of this capitulationist line
was the OCI's call for a vote for Mitterrand, the single
candidate of the popular-front Union of the Left, in last
year's French presidential elections. We do not wish to
make an amalgam, equating the LCE with the policy of
Lambert, and we are aware that you have criticized the
latter as constituting "an elevation of the tactical methods
of the united front ... to a strategic principle" ("The Crisis
of the LCR and the En Marcha Split," in [SWP]
International Internal Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 10, No. 24,
December 1973).

However, the line of a "strategy of the class united front"
leads ultimately to just the conclusion the OCl has reached.
The global alternative to the class collaborationist policies
of the reformists is not an all-embracing united front of the
organizations claiming to represent the working class nor a
mythical "class pact," but rather the Marxist program of
the Leninist vanguard party. To demand that the Stalinists
and social democrats break an electoral coalition with
bourgeois parties, to call on the reformists to fight for
particular demands in the interests of the class is both
principled and necessary; it enables us to demonstrate
graphically before the masses the fact that these treacher-
ous misleaders are enemies of proletarian revolution. But
to imply that the agents of the bourgeoisie in the workers
movement are capable of taking up the full revolutionary
program of the Trotskyist party is to confuse the masses,
hiding from them the counterrevolutionary program of the
reformists and the absolute necessity of an independent
Trotskyist party.

We are aware that the LCE warns of the treachery of the
Stalinists and emphasizes the need for a Trotskyist party.
(So does the OCl, on occasion.) But if, as you state, the
united front encompasses the program of working-class
independence from the bourgeoisie (as opposed to being
one expression of it, in particular circumstances); and if the
Stalinists are capable of taking up the united front — then
surely they cease to be reformists, committed at all costs to
the maintenance of capitalist rule. This is definitely implied
in your "strategic resolution" of the second congress of the
LCE ("Hacia la republica socialista — Por el partido de la
IV Internacional") where the following is said in a reply to
imaginary accusations by the "apparatuses" that the united
front is simply a maneuver:

"If you declare yourselves for the united front and fight
consistently in this direction the working class will be greatly
aided, will close ranks around its organizations and multiply
the impetus of its sallies against the capitalists and their
regime. Then we will stop judging you according to facts
from your terrible past and present treacheries. We will pay
attention to the new facts."

Comrades, when Trotsky said that under special
circumstances the reformists may be forced to go farther
than they intended, he did not mean that they could take up
the full revolutionary program! It was Pablo who said
continued on next page

12

SPARTACIST

Liga Comunista...

this — and he was consistent with his "analyses," by no
longer fighting to create Trotskyist parties but instead
pressuring for the reform of the Stalinist parties. We do not
believe that this is the policy of the Liga Comunista, but it is
the logical end result of your concept of a "strategy of the
class united front."

(We draw your attention to the section on the united
front in our letter to the OCI and OCRFI [Spartacist No.
22, Winter 1973-74] for further observations on the notion
of a "united front strategy.")

This is more than a terminological question. The OCI's
position of voting for the workers parties of a popular front
is derived from the conception of a strategic united front.
The Spartacist tendency, in contrast, refuses to give
electoral support to any of the parties of a popular front; we
call instead for conditional opposition to the workers
parties of a popular front, demanding that they break with
their bourgeois allies as a condition for electoral support.
The logic of our position is quite clear: the fundamental
principle of Marxist politics is political independence of the
proletariat from the class enemy; if a workers party, even a
rotten reformist party such as the British Labour Party,
campaigns on its own for office, we can call on the workers
to vote for this party as an elementary attempt to draw the
class line. But if the workers party is part of a popular front,
then to call on the workers to vote for that party is to call on
them to put a bourgeois political formation in office!

The LCE also called for votes to the workers parties of
the popular front in the second round of the 1973 French
parliamentary elections. You argued that abstentionism is
a passive policy. If it is a question of abstention on
principle, this is correct. The Spartacist tendency, however,
has no such policy, and called for a vote to the candidates of
the OCI and LO [Lutte Ouvriere] which, because they
refused to vote for the Left Radicals, presented at least in a
distorted and very partial manner a class opposition to the
popular front. We also called on the CP and SP to break
from the Left Radicals, making any electoral support to
their candidates conditional on such a break with the
bourgeois party.

We would be interested to know what your policy was in
the 1974 French elections when Mitterrand was the single
candidate of the popular front. In such a case you could
make no pretense of refusing to vote for part of the front;
your concrete advice to the workers would be identical to
that of the Union of the Left's leaders. Also we would be
interested to know your position on the April 25
Portuguese elections. The Portuguese Partido Revolucio-

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nario dos Trabalhadores (PRT), which appears to follow
LCE views generally, refused to give support to any of the
parties which signed the pact with the Armed Forces
Movement. We disagree with the PRT's policy of electoral
support to the [Portuguese] LCI [Liga Comunista
Internacional] (support which was by no means critical, at
least publicly), since in our view the LCI's line toward the
MFA amounted to "critical support" of its "progressive
wing" rather than intransigent class opposition. But the
PRT's refusal to vote for the CP because it was formally
committed to class collaboration in the form of participa-
tion in the bonapartist bourgeois MFA-dominated regime
is correct. Do you disagree with that position?

Workers Commissions and the "Revolutionary
General Strike"

Your statements concerning the workers commissions
also appear to us to reflect the erroneous concept of a
"united front strategy." You write that: "It is in the
Workers Commissions that we Trotskyists think the
fundamental organic base of the united front of the militant
proletariat is to be found" ("The Crisis of the LCR and the
En Marcha Split"). In the "strategic resolution" of the
second congress of the LCE you add: "The force of the
generalized action of the masses, and the centralization of
the will to struggle of extremely broad sectors, increasingly
require the workers commissions to break with the
obstacles which oppose the development of their vocation
as democratic forms of united front of the broad vanguard
of the proletariat.''"

What do you mean by the phrases "fundamental organic
base of the united front" and "vocation as democratic
forms of united front of the broad vanguard"? If you wish
to say that the workers commissions have grouped together
many of the most combative worker militants, that it is
necessary to struggle within them to defeat the Stalinists
and other reformists who currently lead them on the path
of class collaboration, that it would be stupid and
dangerous sectarianism to treat the CC.OO. [workers
commissions] as competitors, tacitly identifying the base
with the leadership— then we can agree. But you apparent-
ly wish to go further.

To talk of the "vocation" of a particular institution in the
class struggle is metaphysical. What is the "vocation" of the
trade unions, to defend the interests of the workers against
the bosses (which is impossible in this epoch except under
revolutionary leadership) or to serve the interests of the
bosses (as is almost universally the case)? You can say that
the present class-collaborationist policies of the unions are
a deformation of their basic purpose. But then Lenin was
wrong to insist that an independent vanguard party was
necessary in order to bring the working class to socialist
consciousness, and that trade-union consciousness is
bourgeois consciousness.

And what of the Russian Soviets from February until
September 1917— was their "vocation" that of serving as
the organizational structure for the creation of a workers
state? Then surely Lenin must have been wrong in
withdrawing the slogan of "all power to the Soviets" during
the ferocious counterrevolutionary repression unleashed
by Kerensky following the July days. Shouldn't the
Bolsheviks instead have limited themselves to struggling

SPRING 1977

13

for a majority in the Soviets, unconditionally submitting
themselves to the discipline of the soviet majority? They did
not do so, and they were right.

The function of a particular institution in the class
struggle is decided by the constellation of political class
forces which determines its policy. The German workers
councils of 1918 were dominated by the majority social
democrats and ratified the establishment of a bourgeois
parliamentary republic, for example. One can speak of the
actual role played by this or that institution, and one can
also speak of the capacity of a particular framework to
fulfill other functions.

In our view, the actual role played by the Spanish
workers commissions has been that of illegal trade unions.
True, on occasion they have led mass mobilizations
extending far beyond the limits of a particular occupation-
al category. But so has the Bolivian miners federation,
which for many years maintained armed workers militias.
Moreover, you too make a distinction between the workers
commissions and the "committees elected and subject to
recall in assemblies." This is not mere formalism, since at
present (as we understand it) most workers commissions
are not elected, are dominated by reformist misleaders and
many have even expelled militants who wished to pursue a
combative class-struggle policy.

What is the capacity of the workers commission? Andres
Nin was wrong to believe that the anarchist-led CNT trade-
union federation could take the place of Soviets; he ignored
the fact that even these combative unions were dominated
by a bureaucracy and were structured in a manner such as
to delay or repress the expression of the direct will of the
masses. The workers commissions, in contrast, are much
more fluid, incompletely coordinated and lacking the
heavy weight of a massive bureaucracy such as develops in
the unions under conditions of bourgeois legality. Thus the
workers commissions may be transformed into democratic
workers councils in the heat of a mass upsurge, in a similar
manner shop stewards councils could have been trans-
formed into factory committees in the course of the 1926
general strike in Great Britain.

In the United States we have fought syndicalist
tendencies which see the unions as enemies of the workers
because of the treacherous policy of the misleaders. in
Britain during the 1 973 miners strike we called for a general
strike organized by the shop stewards councils, and
criticized the utopianism of the International Marxist
Group which sought to create "councils of action" out of
thin air. A party cannot lightly break the discipline in
action of the unions every time it disagrees with the policy
adopted: until the outbreak of massive working-class
upsurges it will necessarily focus its efforts on winning
leadership of these institutions. But we do not submit
ourselves unconditionally to the discipline of any institu-
tion beyond the party on the grounds that its "vocation" is
to serve as the organic base of the united front. We must be
prepared under certain circumstances to break the united
front in order to take the struggle forward when the
reformists begin to betray.

The "Revolutionary General Strike"

The Liga Comunista frequently speaks of the
|^ "Revolutionary General Strike to overthrow the Franco

1^"

dictatorship." Evidently this is intended to contrast with
the CP's call for a "national strike" as some kind of act of
national reconciliation; in a similar manner, the "class
pact" proposed by the LCE is evidently intended to
contrast with the CP's "pact for liberty." We are, of course,
entirely in favor of the most effective slogans counterpos-
ing the program of class independence to the reformists'
policy of class collaboration. But one must be careful in
such matters not to oversimplify.

On the one hand, the slogan of a revolutionary general
strike appears to be unduly specific as to the form of a
revolutionary upheaval against the Franco regime. The
1934 uprising in Asturias immediately took on the form of
an insurrection, for instance. In this respect, the slogan has
sort of the character of a "social myth" a la Sorel. A similar
example was the syndicalist slogan during World War I of a
general strike against war. Of course a general strike may
well be the means by which the bonapartist dictatorship is
toppled.

Much more fundamentally, we are unclear as to the sense
in which you use the slogan of the workers government and
its relation to the general strike. On the one hand, your
"strategic resolution" refers to "the formula of a govern-
ment of the workers based on the organs of the general
strike." This we consider a correct slogan in the event of a
general strike; clearly, the task of the revolutionaries must
be not only to form a central strike committee but also to
give it a soviet character, transforming it into an organ of
dual power and struggling to impose the rule of a
government based on the democratic expression of this
unitary representative organ of the independent workers
movement. Such a formulation is sharply contrasted to the
recent call by the Portuguese Liga Comunista Internacio-
nal (LCI) for "the imposition of a workers government
within the framework of a capitalist state."

On the other hand, you write of the LCR that "It
becomes ever more difficult to see, in their writings, if they
really make a distinction between the overthrow of the
dictatorship and the overthrow of capitalism. The rejection
of the slogan of a real constituent assembly, as well as the
ideological use of workers control, educate the militants in
the illusion that the extension of democratic committees,
and even more the rise of Soviets, signify that the
revolutionary positions have already defeated the influence
of the reformist alternatives. The transitional slogan of the
workers government is ever more confused, then, with the
dictatorship of the proletariat" ("The Crisis in the
LCR...").

We do not have extensive documentation of the writings
of the LCR which you refer to. In any case, we would
oppose dropping the slogan of a constituent assembly in
the Spanish context (and we repeatedly called for a
democratically elected constituent assembly in Portugal in
the year following the overthrow of Caetano). But we do
not conceive of the call for a constituent assembly as
representing some kind of intermediate stage of the
revolution; in a pre-revolutionary situation, we could
simultaneously call for the formation of a soviet-type
unitary organization representative of the entirety of the
continued on page 21

14

SPARTACIST

The two adjacent documents were submitted in July 1973
to the pre-conference discussion of the Socialist Workers
Party (SWP) by supporters of the Revolutionary Interna-
tionalist Tendency (RIT): the "Declaration of Revolution-
ary Internationalist Tendency" (SV/P Discussion Bulletin
Vol. 31, No. 22, July 1973 and "The Fight in the United
Secretariat: Reformist Appetite Versus Guerrillaist Cen-
trism" (SWP Discussion Bulletin Vol. 31, No. 28, July
1973).

The RIT had coalesced around the general political line
of two earlier pre-convention documents written by Gerald
Clark C'The Only Road to Revolution is Through the
Proletariat" and "A Program for Building a Proletarian
Party: In Opposition to the Centrism of the Party
Majority" printed, respectively, in SWP Discussion
Bulletin Vol. 31. No. I, April 1973, and Vol. 31, No. 14,
June 1973). Although partial, these two documents to-
gether presented a broad-ranging criticism of both wings of
the factionatly polarized "United" Secretariat (USec).

Moving swiftly to bureaucratically suppress a principled
Trotskyisl opposition, the reformist SWP leadership
refused the RIT permission to participate in the interna-
tional discussion within the USec. Although abiding by this
anti- Leninist decision, the RIT supporters were summarily
expelled from the SWP within a few weeks after the
national conference, charged with "collaboration with the
Spartacist League" (see "SWP Uses Watergate Methods
Against Trotskyists," Workers Vanguard No. 29, 28
September 1973). The "proof" of this so-called "collabora-
tion" was the testimony of four SWP members who spent
days slithering in the grass near the site of an SL
educational summer camp and who claim to have spied two
RIT supporters.

Following his expulsion Clark (together with a member
of the National Committee of the Communist League of
Australia who had been expelled in September 1973 for
solidarizing with the RIT) addressed an appeal to the
Tenth World Congress of the USec protesting the
bureaucratic expulsions of RIT supporters and demanding
the circulation of RIT documents (subsequently reprinted
in Spartacist [edition frangaise] No. 6, June 1974). The
appeal was denied and ignored through the common action
of the SWP and the leadership of the International
Majority Tendency (IMT).

One leader of the pro-IMT Internationalist Tendency
(IT) of the S WP, apprehensive that theirs would be the next
necks on the chopping block, registered an internal, pro-
forma protest over the expulsion of Clark. Yet a year later
the IT leaders carried out a no less bureaucratic purge
within their own ranks, expelling two members of the IT
Steering Committee who opposed the cynical wheeling and
dealing between the IMT and the SWP over "reintegra-
tion" of the expelled IT members, and who had demanded
an immediate break with the reformist SWP (see "IT
Expels Left Oppositionists for Demanding 'Break with the
SWP'." Workers Vanguard No. 59. 3 January I97r)-

Following their expulsion the supporters of the RIT
joined the SL.

The Fight in the

United

Secretariat

Reformist
Appetite vs.
Guerrillaist
Centrism

In the struggle within the United Secretariat, the
minority, centered on the (fraternally related) SWP,
represents a reformist tendency, approximating the pre-
World War 1 Social Democracy, while the majority,
centered on the French Ligue Communiste, is a centrist
current presently defending insurrectionary nationalist
Stalinism of the left Maoist-Guevarist variety. Both
tendencies are profoundly opportunist, but with differing
views as to the possibilities of realizing their opportunist
appetites. In large part, these differences reflect the
different political conditions in the U.S. and Western
Europe. Overawed by the apparent stability of American
society and the authority of its ruling class, the SWP
leadership cannot conceive of attaining power except
through collaboration with a section of the bourgeoisie.
Thus, the dominant activity of the SWP in the past several
years has been the creation of a non-declora] popular front
in opposition to the Vietnam war (with no possibility of
generating an electoral extension at present because the
SWP has little to offer the powerful capitalist parties).
NPAC [National Peace Action Coalition] and its prede-
cessors were deliberately designed with a programmatic
invitation to elements of the ruling class, and a few
prominent Democratic Party politicians duly accepted the
offer. The main reason the SWP has reversed its past
enthusiastic (although platonic) advocacy of guerrilla war
is that association with real guerrilla-terrorists threatens to
destroy the SWP's respectability in the face of bourgeois
public opinion. Would Senator Hartke or Congresswoman
Abzug have joined a "coalition" with a party associated
with people kidnapping U.S. business executives? This is
the spectre that haunts the SWP leadership: the armed
crazies in the United Secretariat will drive away our
bourgeois liberal collaborators!

SPRING 1977

15

Existing in less stable societies, the international
majority sections are more optimistic about the armed
seizure of state power than is the SWP leadership, and are
contemptuous of its legalistic respectability. However, the
international majority is no less opportunist than the SWP
leadership.

Thus Comrade Germain endorsed the fundamental line
of the SWF's class collaborationist antiwar work: "The
role played by the American Trotskyists in stimulating and
helping to organise a mass antiwar movement in the USA
expresses a similar transformation. This mass antiwar
movement. . . became a political factor of great importance
in the world relationship of forces helping the struggle of
the Vietnamese revolution against the counter-
revolutionary war of imperialism." (Ernest Germain, "In
Defence of Leninism: In Defence of the Fourth Interna-
tional," International Internal Discussion Bulletin, Vol-
ume X, Number 4, April 1973, page 41.)

By way of criticism. Comrade Germain merely observes
that the SWP could also have devoted "more specific
propaganda directed to a more limited vanguard, explain-
ing the need to support the Vietnamese revolution till its
final victory." {Ibid., page 46.) Ah, but Vance Hartke
wouldn't have liked that! It was not an accident that the
SWP consistently avoided raising even a figleaf of class
politics in the antiwar movement. But the international

majority, of course, was hardly in a position to criticize the
SWP's class collaboration over the Vietnam war since the
Ligue Communiste supported that classic and easily
recognizable popular front, the Union of the Left, in the
last French election. Expectedly the SWP leadership
returned the favor by uncritically publicizing the Ligue's
class collaboration on that occasion.

For even in order to establish erstwhile orthodox
credentials, the SWP— at least while the elections were
under way and illusions were high— did not attack the
French section for capitulation to the Union de la Gauche
popular front. The SWP has made popular frontism the
very center of its so-called "mass" work through its major
activity, the antiwar movement. The SWP's substantial
numerical growth since the early 1960s has been achieved
precisely through the party's immersion in the classless
antiwar movement, where along with the reformist
Communist Party, the SWP bears major responsibility for
keeping the struggle within the bounds of the liberal
capitalist framework through the "single issue" strategy.
The whole purpose of this policy was the deliberate refusal
to raise the class question of the Vietnamese revolution,
and the denial of the interrelationship between struggling
to sharpen the domestic class struggle and defending the
Vietnamese revolution. Instead, the party prided itself on
continued on page 17

Declaration of the Revolutionary
Internationalist Tendency

The present crisis of capitalism has entered into a new
period. The turning point in this crisis was the August 15,
1971, policy of the United States government imposing
wage controls upon the working class, and seeking as well
to better its own position at the expense of the other
imperialist bourgeoisies. These measures initiated a
general, international crisis of bourgeois relations. The
result has been a growing instability of bourgeois regimes,
(exacerbated by the continuing war in Southeast Asia and
the rising competition in trade and a faltering monetary
system.

The post-war stability of the capitalist system based
upon American hegemony was first shattered in 1968 with
the Vietnamese Tet offensive, which brought the Johnson
administration to its knees, and this was accompanied by a
wide-ranging new rise in the class struggle: the French
general strike, the Czech events, followed by major
upheavals in northern Italy, Poland, Ireland, Chile, and
Argentina. In every part of the world— advanced capitalist
countries, the deformed workers states, colonial and
semicolonial nations — the class struggle has emerged with
a vigor unseen since the 1930s.

The revolutionary socialist movement, small and
isolated from the working class, must realize and take
advantage of this new period to begin the long, uphill
struggle to root our forces in the working class and prepare
our cadre for the battles which are sure to come. But not to

simply proclaim to the world our proletarian character and
love for the workers. No! Our strategy of penetrating the
workers' organizations is based on our analysis of the deep-
going crisis of leadership of the proletariat and the
necessity to defeat the present misleaders who have tied the
working class to the saddle of the bourgeoisie.

But so far the proletariat has refused to be whipped into
line. Caught between the bourgeois parties and the
traditional reformist and Stalinist misleaders, the working
class struggles militantly against the attacks by capital but
is unable to advance beyond the limits of bourgeois
relations. Only under the leadership of the revolutionary
vanguard will it be possible to advance the struggle for
socialism and defeat capitalism once and for all.

But the vanguard must be armed with a program which is
in the interests of the proletariat and capable of organizing
it for the successful conquest of power. The present
leaderships of the United Secretariat and the Socialist
Workers Party offer no such program. Both tendencies
within the world movement offer us two forms of the same
substance: political liquidationism. In the case of the SWP,
liquidation into petty-bourgeois milieus and the subordi-
nation of the vanguard role of the revolutionary party to
the reformist leaderships of the petty-bourgeois move-
ments, and in the labor movement its support to
government-tied reformers — like the UlVIW's Miller and
continued on next page

16

SPARTACIST

RIT Declaration...

the NMU's Morrissey. In the case of the I MT [Internation-
al Majority Tendency of the United Secretariat], liquida-
tion into guerrillaism and the "new mass vanguard" of
Europe, which also represents a subordination of the role
of the vanguard party. Therefore, both tendencies are
unsupportable.

On the international level the positions put forward in
Comrade Clark's document "The Only Road to Revolu-
tion is the Proletariat," represents for us a generally correct
program and strategy for building revolutionary parties
throughout the world in the next period. A strategy which
places the proletariat in the center of our work and the
organization of a mass, democratic-centralist Internation-
al, rooted in the working class and capable of leading
workers in the struggle for power, as a major objective of
the Trotskyist movement.

Within the United States, we are in general agreement
with the line of the document "A Program for Building a
Proletarian Party: In Opposition to the Centrism of the
Party Majority," also authored by Comrade Clark. This
document counterposes a revolutionary Marxist program
and perspective to the reformist democratic program of the
party majority. In opposition to the "sectoral" thesis of the
party leadership, which adapts to the democratic demands
of Blacks, Chicanos, women, gays, students, and labor
bureaucrats, the document calls for immediate major
implantation into the unions to carry out work based on
the Transitional Program and the principle of class unity
against capitalist exploitation. In calling for the formation
of trade-union caucuses based on the Transitional
Program, the document correctly poses the question within
the workers' movement of who should lead the class:
revolutionary socialists or the present labor lieutenants of
capital. These tasks flow directly from the evaluation we
had made of the present period.

The political bankruptcy of the SWP majority's program
and perspectives has been clearly revealed in its stubborn
clinging to a student orientation in the face of qualitative
changes in the world situation. What is worse, the majority
has dug deeper into this milieu the more openly the crisis of
bourgeois society develops. Unable to face this reality
squarely, i.e., act in a revolutionary manner, the majority
resorts to a frenzied attempt to appear "orthodox" before
the final curtain is raised and reveals its two-stage theory of
revolution for all sectors of the world movement!

Yet with the present method and practice of the SWP
majority, should it decide tomorrow to turn massively to a
"labor orientation," as it may well be compelled to do, such
an orientation could only be a reflection of its continuing
practice in other arenas. The task of Leninists among all
strata of the oppressed is to fuse together their struggles
into the general class struggle, to transcend all narrow,
partial, and therefore counterposed, aspects. Only the
program and practice of revolutionary Marxism has the
capacity to achieve this. Hence the centrality of a
revolutionary proletarian perspective in no way excludes
work in other sections of the opppressed but rather directs
the thrust of such work.

Two years ago, a struggle was launched to orient the
party toward the proletariat. It failed. It failed because the

comrades of the Proletarian Orientation Tendency refused
to address themselves to the question of program, and
underestimated the degree to which the party has retreated
from genuine Trotskyism. But because these questions
couldn't be avoided, a split took place in the POT within a
year after the convention. Those who took up the question
of program in a serious manner eventually grouped into the
Leninist Faction.

But those who retreated from this question of program
are now, in their majority, grouped into the International-
ist Tendency and the West-Coast Tendency. Both have
declared that they are in principled agreement with the
International Majority Tendency. What differences they
do have with the IMT are subordinated in the interests of
organizational maneuvers. Inside both the tendencies
which support the IMT there are wide and divergent
political views that centrifugal force will probably pull
apart in the future again. Despite the many correct
criticisms these tendencies make of the party's program, we
cannot support them because of our principled disagree-
ment with the program of the IMT.

The International Majority Tendency in standing for the
petty-bourgeois guerrilla road in the colonial world —
which even if successful could at best lead to a deformed
workers state, and at the expense of a working-class
centered revolution— has reaped with the PRT-ERP [the
Argentine Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores —
Ejercito Revolucionario del Pueblo] the inevitable conse-
quences: that for such guerrillas, a Mao or a Castro, not a
Trotsky, is their legitimate ideological hero and inspirer. In
Europe, the IMT's latest fad is the phrase "new mass
vanguard" and the revolution guaranteed within five years.
These quick remedies are not one bit superior to the
concept of "red universities" as bastions of revolution, or
"from the periphery to the center," since for many years
they lamentably failed to turn Stalinist and reformist
bureaucrats into involuntary revolutionaries through the
tactic of "deep entryism." And for the United States, the
IMT has been content to endorse the whole past work of
the SWP, suggesting only that it might have been given a
somewhat more radical cover.

The issue of democratic centralism in the United
Secretariat is a travesty of Trotskyism. Democratic
centralism—internal democracy and iron front of disci-
pline in external work — is a vital requirement for
proletarian revolutionaries;, no less on the international
than on the national plane. In the disparity of elements in
the United Secretariat whose marriage of convenience is
profoundly shaken, the pretense of discipline can only
alternate between centrist mockery and bureaucratic
abuse.

We know that many left-wing members of the party have
been drawn to the IMT because of some of its correct
specific criticisms of positions of the SWP. We hope to
show these elements that the concept of "the enemy of our
enemy is our friend" is not always true; in fact in this case, is
a destructive illusion.

On the basis of the position of this statement, we take our
stance at this crucial moment in the history of our
movement, and call upon all serious revolutionaries in the

SPRING 1977

17

Fight in the USec...

(continued from page 15)

being the "best builders" of impotent parades and rallies
prominently featuring bourgeois politicians.

In an attempt to obscure the fundamentally popular
frontist character of its antiwar work, the SWP has
published in its Education for Socialists series two chapters
from "The People's Front: The New Betrayal," written by
James Burnham and published by the SWP in 1937 as its
principal public declaration against the people's front. But
the SWP has not republished the last chapter of Burnham's
pamphlet, which describes how the Stalinists applied the
people's front to the U.S., where they were not strong
enough to bargain away proletarian revolution for
governmental posts.

Burnham wrote: "Most significant of all is the applica-
tion of the People's Front policy to 'anti-war work.'
Through a multitude of pacifist organizations, and
especially through the directly controlled American
League Against War and Fascism, the Stalinists aim at the
creation of a 'broad, classless People's Front of all those
opposed to war.' The class-collaborationist character of the
People's Front policy is strikingly revealed through the
Stalinist attitude in these organizations. They rule out in
advance the Marxist analysis of war as necessarily resulting
from the inner conflicts of capitalism and therefore
genuinely opposed only by revolutionary class struggle
against the capitalist order and in contrast maintain that all
persons, from whatever social class or group, whether or
not opposed to capitalism, can 'unite' to stop war."

This Trotskyist condemnation of the popular front
policy of the U.S. Stalinists reads as if it had been written
specifically to describe the precise practice of the SWP in
the antiwar movement — the practice which Comrade
Germain finds principled!

Similarly over the question of the SWP's blatant
accommodation to petty-bourgeois nationalism. Comrade
Germain seeks to establish orthodox Leninist credentials
for the international majority by denouncing the Canadian
section and counterposing to the LSA/LSO [League for
Socialist Action/ Ligue Socialiste Ouvriere] extensive
quotations from Lenin on the difference between the right
of nations to self-determination on the one hand and

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nationalism— a pernicious anti-working-class ideology
covering overt collaboration with the class enemy — on the
other.

But when push comes to shove. Comrade Germain has
nothing but fulsome praise for the SWP's abandonment of
Leninism over Black and Chicano nationalism: "The
analysis and projections made by Comrade George
Breitman in that respect were among the most important
creative contributions to Marxist thought realized by the
world Trotskyist movement since the murder of Leon
Trotsky. The conclusion was obvious: Black (and Chicano)
nationalism in the United States are objectively progressive
forces which revolutionary Marxists had to support,
stimulate and help organise independently from the two big
American bourgeois parties and from the still non-existent
labour party." ("In Defence of Leninism...," page 43.)

Not "Armed Struggle," But Proletarian
Revolution

The central revision of revolutionary Marxism by the
international majority is the separation of the class
organization of an insurrection from the society emerging
from it. A revolutionary workers state, in which the
working class democratically governs on the basis of
collectivized property, can only be established if the armed
forces of the labor movement itself play the dominant role
in overthrowing the capitalist state. The insurgent
peasantry and urban petty bourgeoisie are necessary allies
of the proletariat in socialist revolutions in backward
countries. However, as Trotsky insisted again and again in
his fight against Stalinism, the decisive question is whether
the proletariat leads the petty bourgeoisie or vice versa. The
leadership of the proletariat in a social revolution does not
have a general or nebulous political or ideological form.
Any bourgeois nationalist, petty-bourgeois radical or
Stalinist can and often does claim to be fighting for workers
power. "Proletarian leadership" is meaningless rhetoric
unless extended to military dominance during an insurrec-
tion. The leading role of the proletariat in a social
revolution also means the military dominance of proletari-
an armed forces (workers militias and proletarian sections
of the old armed forces) during the insurrection. This is a
fundamental principle of revolutionary Marxism. Who-
ever denies it is not a Trotskyist!

Where capitalism has been overthrown primarily by
petty-bourgeois armed forces (Yugoslavia, China,
Vietnam, Cuba), what has emerged are deformed workers
states— hmeaucrauc ruling castes based on collectivized
(i.e., working-class) property forms. That the guerrilla road
to power necessarily leads to a Stalinist regime is shown by
the Cuban revolution, where the insurrectionary leadership
did not begin as conscious Stalinists. Rather, the 26th of
July Movement was a heterogeneous radical nationalist
group originating out of the militant adventurist wing of
the party of the Cuban liberal bourgeoisie (the Ortodoxo
Party). However, in order to overthrow capitalism and
maintain bonapartist rule of the consolidating bureaucrat-
ic caste over the Cuban working class, Castro's movement
had to become a Stalinist party, merging with the wretched
Cuban CP.

In a generally politically correct document. Comrade
continued on next page

18

SPARTACIST

Fight in the USec...

Gerald Clark states, "By incorrectly generalizing the
unusual experiences of the Cuban revolution and applying
them on a continental scale in Latin America, the majority
has revealed its petty-bourgeois adaptation to non-
revolutionary currents in the workers movement." (Gerald
Clark, "The Only Road to Revolution Is Through the
Proletariat," SIVP Discussion Bulletin, Volume 31,
Number 1, April 1973, page 8.)

This statement indicates that Comrade Clark has not yet
entirely transcended the theoretical framework of Pablo-
ism. Revolutionary Marxists oppose the abandonment of
"the Leninist norm of proletarian revolutions" in favor of
"the Cuban road to power" not because "the Cuban road"
is unlikely to succeed elsewhere - indeed, the Bolshevik
revolution has not yet been repeated elsewhere — but
because it necessarily produces a nationalist, anti-working-
class regime. Soviet Russia in 1917-24 and Cuba (or
China or Russia today) are two different types of societal
organizations separated hy a political revolution. Between
Trotskyism on the one hand and Castro, Mao, Ho Chi
Minh and their ilk on the other is a line of blood! They
know this and so should we.

The Consistency of the Argentine PRT

The debate has centered around the politics and
activities of the international majority-supported group in
Argentina, the PRT (Combatiente). The international
majority has simultaneously defended the PRT against
minority accusations of adventurism and criticized it for
Guevarist deviations.

Even when Comrade Germain seeks to demonstrate the
PRT's close ties to the working class, he demonstrates just
the opposite a thoroughgoing petty-bourgeois elitism:

"The ERP detachments penetrated into some 30 factories
where special conditions of repression existed and where
armed factory guards of the bosses and the army terrorized
the workers. They disarmed the guards, convened all the
workers into general assemblies and held long discussions
with them on the present stage of the class struggle in
Argentina." ("In Defence of Leninism...," page 17.)

We might remind Comrade Germain that in 1949 Mao's
Red Army, on a much broader scale, disarmed the repres-
sive bourgeois army and convened (that is, ordered) the
workers to assemble to hold "long discussions" with them.
Revolutionary Marxists seek to replace the repressive
bourgeois state apparatus with armed forces controlled by
the workers movement. By contrast, the PRT seeks to
replace the bourgeois state apparatus with armed petty-
bourgeois bands which are not controlled by the organized
working class.

The PRT's support of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslo-
vakia and its belief in the revolutionary character of the
Cuban, North Korean and Vietnamese Stalinist parties is
not "inconsistency" or "theoretical eclecticism" as Com-
rade Germain contends. The PRT is a consistent
insurrectionary Stalinist organization. It is opposed to
workers democracy in the state which it is seeking to
establish and it is pursuing insurrectionary methods
designed to ensure military control over the working class
should it come to power. It is the PRT's uneasy apologists
of the international majority who are inconsistent. The
international majority claims to believe that a workers state
should be governed through soviet democracy, but
advocates insurrectionary methods which deprive the
working class of decisive military power. The kindest thing
one can say of the international majority position is that it
is Utopian. Just as pre-Marxist socialism looked to the
enlightened members of the bourgeoisie and petty
bourgeoisie to liberate the working class, so the interna-

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tionai majority believes that enlightened and heroic petty-
bourgeois guerrilla fighters will overthrow the capitalist
state and magnanimously grant the working class soviet
power.

The PRT seems to be rapidly moving away from the
United Secretariat. This is easily understandable. Not only
does it flow inevitably from the actual urban guerrilla
struggle the PRT undertakes, but, as Comrade Germain
has himself noted, the initiating PRT cadres who had been
more'Trotskyist" have been largely exterminated. (This is
the usual fate of terrorists practicing terrorism and is a
sufficient comment on the international majority's ap-
proach to the difficult and lengthy task of building
leadership.) Comrade Germain cannot justly disown those
who engage in the "strategy" he defends when they go on to
embrace the corresponding left-Stalinist ideology. Because
they are fundamentally nationalist, regimes which come to
power via the guerrilla road repudiate the perspective of
socialist revolutions in other nations when these are an
obstacle to making diplomatic deals with bourgeois states.
Appropriately, Fidel Castro has evolved in a manner
parallel to his onetime publicist. Comrade Hansen. Castro
too once advocated guerrilla war, but now finds it
"ultraleft." The Havana regime has repudiated guerrilla
war in order to form an alliance with Latin American
bourgeois nationalism (the Peruvian junta, the Chilean
popular front, Peronism). In a like manner, Mao has
endorsed capitalist counterrevolutionary terrorism in
Bangladesh and Ceylon. Some Maoist-Fidelistas are
repelled by the present policies of the Havana and Peking
regimes. These dissident left Stalinists can only be won to
Trotskyism by proving to them that the counterrevolution-
ary foreign policy of Havana and Peking is the organic and
necessary result of the manner in which these regimes came
to power: without the dominant role in the revolution being
played by the working class under Trotskyist leadership.
But all wings of the United Secretariat have adapted to left
Maoism-Guevarism by presenting Trotskyism as a form of
insurrectionary left Stalinism. This is the crime of the
centrist international majority in its policies toward
Argentina.

Terrorists, Guerrillas and Stalinist Bureaucrats

Much confusion exists in our movement about what
Stalinism is. It is far more than an ideology, a particular
political-organizational tradition, and certainly not simply
a phase in the history of the USSR. Stalinism is a social
phenomenon — bureaucratic rule on the basis of working-
class property forms. In addition to being a reformist
working-class current, Stalinism has organic roots in the
urban petty bourgeoisie of the backward countries. Petty-
bourgeois radical nationalists identify with and take as
models the Maoists, Viet Cong and Fidelistas as people like
themselves who have made good. In one of its aspects,
Stalinism is a form of petty-bourgeois radical
nationalism — the politics of aspiring bureaucrats.

No one should be taken in by the international majority's
attempt to make a fundamental distinction between
classical terrorism and contemporary guerrillaism of the
ERP-Tupamaros type. Both represent the same basic
political class content: the attempt by a section of the petty

bourgeoisie to overthrow the bourgeoisie and succeed it as
the dominant stratum in society. Guerrillaism is nothing
more than the current characteristic method of struggle by
petty-bourgeois radical nationalists who in particular
circumstances smoothly transform themselves into Stalin-
ist bureaucrats.

Decades before the emergence of "Marxist-Leninist
guerrillas," Trotsky pointed out the organic connection
between left-wing terrorism and Stalinist bureaucratism:

"Individual terrorism is in its very essence bureaucratism
turned inside out. For Marxists this law was not discovered
yesterday. Bureaucratism has no confidence in the masses
and endeavors to substitute itself for the masses. Terrorism
works in the same manner; it seeks to make the masses
happy without asking their participation. The Stalinist
bureaucracy has created a vile leader-cult, attributing to
leaders divine qualities. 'Hero' worship is also the religion
of terrorism, only with a minus sign. The Nikolaevs
imagine that all that is necessary is to remove a few leaders
by means of a revolver in order for history to take another
course. Communist terrorists, as an ideological grouping,
are of the same flesh and blood as the Stalinist bureaucra-
cy." (Leon Trotsky, "The Stalinist Bureaucracy and the
Kirov Assassination," Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1934-35,
Pathfinder Press, page 124.)

The SWP Leadership: For and Against the
Guerrilla Road to Power

For many years, the SWP leadership was not only an
ardent advocate of guerrilla war, but engaged in idiot
enthusing over the Castro regime and Fidelista movement.
The SWP's self-styled orthodox turn against guerrillaism is
part of its rightward motion in adopting a reformist
program acceptable to sections of the liberal bourgeoisie.
The present arguments over which tendency has a distorted
interpretation of the Ninth World Congress decisions are
quite beside the point.

For the major document which in 1963 laid the basis for
the SWP's unification with the European Pabloists to form
the United Secretariat stated: "(13) Along the road of a
revolution beginning with simple democratic demands and
ending in the rupture of capitalist property relations,
guerrilla warfare conducted by landless peasants and semi-
proletarian forces, under a leadership that becomes
committed to carrying the revolution through to a
conclusion, can play a decisive role in undermining and
precipitating the downfall of a colonial and semi-colonial
power. This is one of the main lessons to be drawn from
experience since the second world war. It must be
consciously incorporated into the strategy of building
revolutionary Marxist parties in colonial countries." ("For
Early Reunification of the World Trotskyist Movement,"
Statement of the Political Committee of the SWP, SWP
Discussion Bulletin, Volume 24, Number 29, April 1963,
page 39. Also quoted in "On the Disputed Questions in the
Fourth International: A Brief Summary," by C. Howard
(IMG), SWP Internal Information Bulletin, Number 3 in
1973, June 1973, page 25.)

Interestingly, at that same time the oppositional
tendency which later became the Spartacist League
produced the following explicit counterposition on
continued on next page

20

SPARTACIST

Fight in the USec...

guerrilla war: "(15) Experience since the Second World
War has demonstrated that peasant-based guerrilla
warfare under petit-bourgeois leadership can in itself lead
to nothing more than an anti-working-class bureaucratic
regime. The creation of such regimes has come about under
the conditions of decayed imperialism, the demoralization
and disorientation caused by Stalinist betrayals, and the
absence of revolutionary Marxist leadership of the
working class. Colonial revolution can have an unequivo-
cably progressive revolutionary significance only under
such leadership of the revolutionary proletariat. For
Trotskyists to incorporate into their strategy revisionism
on the proletarian leadership in the revolution is a
profound negation of Marxism-Leninism no matter what
pious wish may be concurrently expressed for 'building
revolutionary Marxist parties in the colonial countries.'
Marxists must resolutely oppose any adventurist accept-
ance of the peasant-guerrilla road to socialism —
historically akin to the Social Revolutionary program on
tactics that Lenin fought. This alternative would be a
suicidal course for the socialist goals of the movement, and
perhaps physically for the adventurers." ("Towards
Rebirth of the Fourth International — Draft Resolution on
the World Movement," submitted for the Minority by
Shane Mage, James Robertson and Geoffrey White, SWP
Discussion Bulletin, Volume 24, Number 26, June 1963,
page 16.)

It might now appear that the SWP majority has
capitulated to Spartacism on the guerrilla war question!
Such a view however would be inverted. The SWP
leadership's present opposition to guerrillaism flows
directly from its reformist appetites, not simply from
opposition to a tactically adventurist policy. The Spartacist
tendency, while condemning tactical adventurism, op-
posed guerrilla war primarily because of its class content
and the type of regime which emerges from it if successful.

To the interjiational majority's "strategy of armed
struggle," the SWP leadership has counterposed "the
strategy of the Leninist method of party building." Taken
in an abstract and isolated way, the term "Leninist method
of party building" is meaningless and not distinct from the
Kautskyan conception of party building by the old
German Social Democracy. It is deliberately designed to
avoid consideration of the revolutionary overthrow of the
bourgeois state. And the SWP leadership wants to avoid
such a discussion because, at bottom, it is opposed to the
revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist state.

The strongest weapon each side in the international
discussion possesses is the obvious departure from
Trotskyism by the other side. Thus the international
minority can denounce the PRT for Guevarism — but only
by glossing over the S WP's years-long panegyrics to Castro
and Che. It can denounce the Bolivian POR [Partido
Obrero Revolucionario] (Gonzales) for joining the FRA
[Frente Revolucionario Anti-Imperialista] under a "com-
mon bourgeois program" but this is pure hypocrisy for the
enthusiasts of the single-issue reformist NPACs and
WONAACs [Women's National Abortion Action Coali-
tion]. Only those at a great distance from the practice of the

SWP can take these cynical protestations of orthodoxy as
good coin. Similarly, those who can write approvingly of
the European sections for a presumed proletarian
orientation are simply naive if they are not willfully blind.

To take one example: "While the SWP leadership
interpreted the aborted French revolution as a reaffirma-
tion of their intercontinental-wide student strategy, the
European comrades absorbed the true lessons: the
importance of being able to challenge the Stalinists and
reformists inside the workers movement." ("Statement of
Support to the International Majority Tendency," by
Ralph Levitt et al., SWP Discussion Bulletin, Volume 31,
Number 1 1, June 1973, page 3.) In fact the entire thrust of
the Ligue Communiste's "from the periphery to the center"
strategy is the thesis that the party can conquer the crucial
sections of the proletariat by working through marginal
and petty-bourgeois sectors, precisely without having to
confront the entrenched Stalinist and Social-Democratic
leaderships of the organized workers movement. Similarly,
the international majority's protestations of outrage at the
Canadian section's line on nationalism in English Canada
and Quebec are exposed as empty posturing in the light of
the European sections' own capitulatory positions on the
"Arab revolution," the IRA, the Vietnamese Stalinists, and
all the rest.

Conclusion

The SWP leadership is in its working program
committed to a legalistic perspective based on class
collaboration as that which flowered in Kautskyan Social
Democracy. Only the absence of a mass base in the trade-
union bureaucracy, labor aristocracy, and "progressive"
petty bourgeoisie separates the SWP from classic Social
Democracy. The SWP's present "orthodox" attack on
guerrilla adventurism is, in reality, a frightened reaction to
the threat posed by the international majority line to
disrupt the acquisition of such a mass base by the SWP, i.e.,
it is based upon the SWP's own opposition to the
revolutionary overthrow of the state. The international
majority is a genuine centrist swamp. Whatever the
subjective revolutionary intentions of some of them, its
denizens range from the thoroughly corrupt union
bureaucrats of the Ceylonese LSSP(R) [Lanka Sama
Samaj Party (Revolutionary)] to the workerist sectarians
of the British IMG [International Marxist Group]. The
international majority is currently defending a policy of
insurrectionary nationalist Stalinism which denies the
leading role of the proletariat in social revolution as
concretized in the military dominance of workers militias
during the insurrection. The Fourth International as
Trotsky conceived it— a democratic-centralist revolution-
ary proletarian international — can only emerge through
implacable struggle against the reformism of the minority
and the centrism of the majority tendency.

July 9, 1973

*The above contribution is not a document of or does not
necessarily express the views of the other members of the
Revolutionary Internationalist Tendency. [Footnote in the
original.]

SPRING 1977

21

Liga Comunista. . .

(continued from page 13)

organized workers. As to the call for a workers govern-
ment, we raise this as a call for the dictatorship of the
proletariat.

It is possible that a workers government might arise in a
dual power situation and would be transitional in the sense
of not yet having imposed a single proletarian state power
against the rule of capital. But we warn sharply against any
attempt to turn the slogan of the workers government into
a call for the working-class parties to administer the
capitalist state (as both the majority and minority of the
USec do) in the guise of being a tactical application of the
algebraic slogan. Particularly in a general strike situation,
the task of the workers government must be to suppress the
capitalist state apparatus. Any attempt to take it over (as in
Germany in November 1918, when an SPD-USPD
government took over the bourgeois state with the
"support" of the reformist-dominated workers councils)
must mean a bloody suppression of the workers in the
streets. While there may be, in the event, a separation in
time between the overthrow of the dictatorship and the
overthrow of capitalism, the communists must always put
forward the demand for the overthrow of capitalism rather
than some kind of stagist concept (first the overthrow of the
Franco dictatorship by a general strike, then a struggle
against capitalist rule).

"Democratic Control of the Army"

In this respect, a slogan which has appeared in several
publications of the LCE, for "democratic control of the
army" as a task of the workers government, seems
dangerously misleading. In some cases you have phrased
this as "democratic control by soldiers committees," but in
either case it tends to equate the situation of the state
apparatus with industrial production in the factories. We
do not call for workers control of the bourgeois state
apparatus (much less "democratic" control); rather, our
task is to smash it. Likewise, the task of the soldiers
committees is to destroy — not control — the bourgeois
army.

Trotsky trenchantly criticized this dangerous view in a
polemic against the POUM's "thirteen points for victory"
during the Spanish civil war:

"The fourth point proclaims: 'For the creation of an army

controlled by the working class' The army is a weapon of

the ruling class and cannot be anything else. The army is
controlled by whoever commands it, that is, by whoever
holds state power. The proletariat cannot 'control' an army
created by the bourgeoisie and its reformist lackeys. The
revolutionary party can and must build its cells in such an
army, preparing the advanced sections of the army to pass
over to the side of the workers."

—"Is Victory Possible?' April 1937

Toward the Rebirth of the Fourth International!

We have sought to lay out briefly our views on subjects
where there seem to be major areas of disagreement
between the international Spartacist tendency and the Liga
Comunista of Spain. Unfortunately we cannot take up all
topics at once. In order to obtain a more complete

presentation of our positions on fundamental questions
facing the workers movement, we refer you to the
documents collected in Cuadernos Marxistas No. 1. And
we invite a reply by the LCE.

In fighting for the rebirth of the Fourth International,
the international Spartacist tendency not only rejects the
fraudulent claims of the various impostors who today
claim to be the Fl. We also counterpose a fundamentally
different concept of building the world party of socialist
revolution, contrasting with Healy's "International Com-
mittee," whose phony "dialectics" serve only to mask a
constantly changing line and whose only principle is
unconditional submission to the Fuhrer principle; with the
OCl's "Organizing Committee," whose sole basis is
abstract acceptance of the Transitional Program and
agreement that it has "The Continuity"; and most
especially with the "United" Secretariat, which seems to
have as its only criterion for membership affirmation of the
myth that it is the Fourth International.

Because we struggle to crystallize a politically
homogeneous and authentically Trotskyist democratic-
centralist international tendency, Mandel accuses the
Spartacist tendency of trying to build a "monolithic"
International (as he did in Australia last September) and
Alain Krivine accuses us of equating democratic centralism
with "helmets and truncheons" (a speech in Toronto in
July 1974). We would point out, however, that it is the
Mandels, Hansens and Krivines who have repeatedly
expelled principled left oppositionists from their organiza-
tions, while simultaneously covering up the betrayals of
their own factional partners (the case of Bala Tampoe, for
instance). Our tendency is not "monolithic" — it is however
founded on a principled basis of programmatic
congruence.

The swamp of the "United Secretariat" cannot be
reformed. From the very beginning its program has been
based on Pabloist revisionism, committed to chasing after
an endless succession of petty-bourgeois misleaders. As
this putrescent bloc decomposes at an accelerated rate into
wings which want either to capitulate to Guevarist youth or
to become the mainstream social-democratic party of their
country, the task of principled Trotskyists is not to seek
unity of all those opposed to the dominant tendencies in the
USec. The bankruptcy of this approach was graphically
demonstrated by the ill-fated "Third Tendency," which
could not agree on a common document until days before
the "10th World Congress" and then fell apart immediately
afterwards. Rather, it is only by fighting to build an
authentic Trotskyist international tendency based on real
political agreement that the Fourth International can be
re forged. ■

YOUNG SPARTACUS

Monthly Newspaper of the Spartacus Youth League,
Youth Section of the Spartacist League

$2*11 ISSUES

Make checks payable/mail to:
Spartacus Youth Publishing Co.
Box 825, Canal Street Station
New York, New York 10013

22

SPARTACIST

Trotskyist Faction...

(continued from page 24)

aggressive political confrontation with ostensibly Trotsky-
ist groups. But the Nil [Necessary International Initiative]
is by no means an "instrument" of such policies, rather it
constitutes a barrier to programmatic regroupment. The
Nil is neither an open forum for discussion nor a
democratic-centralist international tendency. Since its
formation the Nil has been carrying out common
propagandistic work (Portugal) and includes a mutual
"non-aggression pact" — the questions where there are
political differences are passed over in silence to outsiders
(and to a large extent internally as well). The call for
discussion at the conclusion of the Nil [document]
expresses its character as a rotten bloc: "all those who
accept the spirit of this general statement should partici-
pate." It is not program which is the basis of participation,
but rather a feeling of mutual iits— not excluding state
capitalists, for example, though it does exclude elements
which stand on Trotsky's Transitional Program.

The Nil is a confused conglomeration of left-Pabloist
groups which have gotten together on the basis of standing
somewhere to the left of the USec majority and to the right
of the iSt. What truly unites the Nil (as opposed to
Bender's scholastic exegeses of its "spirit") is: 1. rejection of
the Transitional Program of 1938 as the program of the
imperialist epoch; 2. a defeatist position on the split in the
Fourth International in 1952-54; 3. support for petty-
bourgeois nationalists (for example, in Angola: "For the
Victory of the MPLA," Spartacus No. 22; Lebanon,
Palestine); 4. electoral support to workers parties in
popular fronts (Chile in 1970, France in 1973/74, Pato in
Portugal, the "historic compromise" in Italy).

The superfluous character of the Nil becomes evident in
its contradictory stance toward the USec. Whereas the
Spartacusbund declared at the time of the Fifth NC that it
wanted to smash the USec politically, Roberto wanted
(wants?) to reform it. In any case he weeps bitter tears for
the dead and gone "Third Tendency" of the USec (report
on the meeting of the Joint Commission of the Nil on 2
November 1976 in Paris, p. 1). The position of the
Matgamna group (I-CL [International-Communist
League]) toward the USec is downright impenetrable-
after years of "critical support" to the USec its present
position is: "The I-CL continues to believe that the USFI is
the main stream that has emerged from the communist
tendency personified by Leon Trotsky" ("The I-CL and the
Fourth International," p. 6).

OUT OF THE ROTTEN Nil BLOC, THE Nil IS A
BARRIER WHICH MUST BE SMASHED!

The Trotskyist Faction fights for a policy of aggressive
regroupment on the basis of a clear Trotskyist program. In
basing our politics on the decisions of the first four
Congresses of the Comintern and on the founding
documents of the Fourth International, we recognize the
further programmatic development of the proletarian
world revolution on principled bases — an historical
development proceeding from the revolutionary phases of
the international world parties of the proletariat.

This statement is directed at all Trotskyist elements in
the Spartacusbund. By our analyses we shall demonstrate

to these comrades that the defeats of the Spartacusbund, in
particular in respect to its present main task, the
construction of the party of proletarian world revolution,
are not tactical/ episodic but rather derive from its
programmatic confusion, from its understanding of
programmatic particularism, which continue to unambig-
uously stamp it as a centrist organization from a typical
mold.

Clarity in the following points is central to a Trotskyist
orientation:

I. The Transitional Program is the program of
proletarian world revolution in our epoch. The document
springs from the Marxist methodology in analyzing the
present historical period. Hence the basic conclusions
stemming from it have a necessary political and organiza-
tional form and constitute the foundations of our strategy
and tactics.

We thus reject all suggestions which take the "destruc-
tion" of the program of the Fourth International as the
basis for political work and which therefore must inevitably
lead to a revision of the Trotskyist program. The
organizations of the Nil, which are by no means of one
mind as to when the Transitional Program became
inadequate and how it is to be "reconstructed," express
only their common revisionist appetites when they adopt
this position.

II. On the one hand the "popular front," on the other
fascism— these are the last means of imperialism against
proletarian revolution. The program and politics of such a
coalition government are never anything but bourgeois
through and through. We thus reject all tactical maneuver-
ing vis-a-vis such coalitions, precisely because the class line
passes not through but rather outside "popular fronts."

We explicitly reject every form of electoral support for
parties or groups taking part in, or directly working
toward, a "popular front." Only a break with the bourgeois
"allies" may make such critical support for reformist or
revisionist workers organizations possible. The FMR
(Roberto)'s electoral support ("Vote red," printed without
criticism in Spartacus No. 29) for the "repulsive class
collaboration of the PCI [Communist Party of Italy]"
{ibid.) is merely the last in a long series of capitulations vis-
a-vis pop fronts. The dividing line between Bolshevism and
Menshevism is, as Trotsky wrote, drawn by one's attitude
toward popular fronts.

III. The social-democratic and Stalinist parties are in
their essence simultaneously bourgeois and proletarian.
These parties are particularly characterized by the
antagonism between the proletarian class and a traditional
leadership, between the working-class rank and file and the
worker bureaucracy. Hence the Stalinist, as well as the
social-democratic, parties are currents in the workers
movement with a twofold character. They are simultane-
ously bourgeois and workers parties — or in Lenin's words,
"bourgeois workers parties."

The additional ties of Stalinist parties to the "worker
bureaucracies" of the deformed or degenerated workers
states do not in principle alter the quality of this definition,
since these bonapartist bureaucracies are channels for
bourgeois influence on the workers movement (the
Stalinist parties' severing of ties with these state
bureaucracies — as in Spain, France and Italy— is ex-

SPRING 1977

23

pressed as a process of their transformation into national
reformist parties). On no point are the positions of the Nil
groups more contradictory than on the question of
reformism. Though the Spartacusbund (see Tanas,
Ergebnisse und Perspektiven No. 2) made a qualitative
distinction between the SPD [Social Democratic Party of
Germany] as a "bourgeois" party ("based on support by the
workers") and Stalinist workers parties, this position is
contradicted by their being qualitatively equated in the Nil
[document] (which speaks of the "counterrevolutionary
role of reformist parties..., [whether] Stalinist or social-
democratic"). The I-CL practices entrism in the Labour
Party and gave "critical support" to Anthony Benn (as a
"Labour left") in the election of the BLP's new candidate
for prime minister.

IV. We use the slogan of the workers government in the
sense in which it was understood by the Bolsheviks in 1917
and by the Fourth International in its founding documents.
Accordingly it is an anti-bourgeois, anti-capitalist slogan,
in which the need for the proletariat to seize power by its
own means is unambiguously expressed. All the slogans of
the Transitional Program, i.e., our entire revolutionary
strategy and tactics, give the slogan of the workers
government only one single concrete meaning, namely, as
the popular term for the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The Spartacusbund's fatal misunderstanding of this
slogan emerges most brutally in its demand for Spain,
where a (PCE/PSOE [Communist Party/ Socialist Party])
"workers government" brought to power by a general
strike is supposed to convene a Constituent Assembly
{Spartacus No. 23). This slogan is identical with the
demand that the working class should, after a successful
uprising, hand over power to the "democratic" counter-
revolution (and offers a close analogy to events in Germany
in 1918-19, where an uprising placed power in the hands of
the Ebert-Scheidemann "workers government" — as the
Spartacusbund understands the term — which then, after
smashing the revolutionary workers movement, proceeded
to convene the National Assembly).

V. The Trotskyist Faction supports the right of all
nations to national self-determination. But in so doing
there can be no question of politically supporting petty-
bourgeois nationalist hberation movements; instead one
must carry out the military struggle against repressive
imperialist measures in common with them — under one's
own flag. In no case do we give our military support in
order to play off a "more progressive" nationalist
movement against other petty-bourgeois nationalist
groups or even to assist them to power through our military
support.

Concerning military support against imperialist
conquest, we are in every case guided by the viewpoint that
in the last analysis the working class can come to power
only when it has dealt with its own bourgeoisie. The
recognition that the petty-bourgeois nationalist leaders of
today — if victorious — are the national bourgeoisie of
tomorrow excludes our support for one bourgeois-
nationalist faction against another, since the sole question
is who will stabilize a bourgeois-nationalist regime. From
the standpoint of the historical interests of the working
class every nationalism is reactionary.

VI. The organizational form of a Trotskyist party is

inseparably linked to its programmatic clarity and consists
in practicing democratic centralism in line with the
Bolshevik-Leninist conception (codified in the Resolution
on the Organization Question of the Third World Congress
of the Comintern); hence it must be recognized from the
beginning as a principle to be applied internationally. The
principle of democratic centralism means the most
complete freedom of discussion internally, along with a
complete unity of action externally. We decisively reject
using "external freedom of criticism" to appeal to
backward elements of the working class standing outside
the Marxist organization in order to mobilize these
elements against other sections of the Marxist Vanguard.

VII. We recognize that a currently embryonic party
organization must necessarily constitute itself in the form
of a "fighting propaganda group" in order, by destroying
ostensibly revolutionary organizafions, to initiate and /or
drive forward a regroupment process in order thereby to
build up one's own organization.

In doing so the character of this work must always be
regarded as exemplary, rejecting out of hand any
voluntaristic notion of intervening as a propaganda group
into all the daily struggles of the working class, inasmuch as
this would lead to dissipating one's own forces and to
liquidating the program.

VIII. The Trotskyist Faction advocates the principle of
the united front tactic, according to which complete
freedom of criticism must be preserved in each action
carried out jointly with other organizations. We reject
every form of common propaganda with other organiza-
tions. We consistently apply the principle of unity in a given
action, which must have a short term and practical goal
corresponding to the method of "march separately, strike
together." Both the bloc with Quicuchi [leader of a small
Angolan group much touted by the Spartacusbund] and
the common struggle of all workers organizations "against
the police state and repression" (defensive-offensive
alliance) contradict this Leninist concept and imply a
common understanding of the strategy and tactics of
proletarian class defense.

IX. Implanting the organization in the working class
through factory and trade-union work must be carried out
without any restrictions at the programmatic level and, at
the present stage of constructing the party, can be carried
out only in an exemplary fashion if one is not to succumb to
the impressionist pressure of possible resulting social
relationships, such as wishing to lead or initiate struggles in
a given plant or trade union without having constructed a
leadership there as the instrument of the party.

"Communists always and everywhere advocate the historical
tasks of the proletariat as opposed to all particular interests,
under some circumstances even without, or in opposition to.
large sections of the working class and its organizations."
— Resolution of the Fifth National Congress of the
Spartacusbund

The Trotskyist Faction is fighting for support to the
above platform, the dividing line between revolutionary
Trotskyism and Menshevism.

Berlin, 14 December 1976

24

SPARTACIST

SPRING 1977

Spartacusbund Expels Left Opposition

Trotskyist Faction Fuses
with TLD

Reprinted below is the founding document of the
Trotskyist Fraction (TF) of the German Spartacusbund.
When confronted by a principled Trotskyist opposition at
their sixth national conference in January 1977, the
Spartacusbund centrists bureaucratically expelled the TF
solely for refusing to repudiate its political positions and to
"recognize completely the authority of the past and future
leadership of the Spartacusbund" (see "Trotskyist Faction
Expelled by Spartacusbund, " Workers Vanguard No. 142,
28 January 1977).

Originating as a left split from the German section of the
United Secretariat (VSec) in 1969-70 the Spartacusbund
never definitively broke with central tenets and traditions
of Pabloist revisionism, despite its short-lived binge of self-
criticism and left-sounding ami- Pabloism begun at the fifth
national conference in August 1975. Foundering in centrist
disorientation, and increasingly beset by severe demorali-
zation (losing half its membership during the past year), the
disintegrating Spartacusbund in March 1976 cast its lot
with the so-called "Necessary International Initiative"
(Nil), a left-of-the- USec rotten bloc brokered by the Italian
Frazione Marxista Rivoluzionaria (now renamed Lega
Comunista) and also including the Austrian Internationale
Kommunistische Liga and the British International-
Communist League.

As the TF document demonstrates, the Nil
conglomerate has little in common beyond similar
appetites for opportunist maneuvers with the USec and
mutual antipathy for the authentic Trotskyism upheld by
the international Spartacist tendency. Although at odds
with one another over a range of crucial issues the centrist
groups lashed together in the Nil share a Pabloist
methodology which finds its fullest expression in their
rejection of the Transitional Program; the Nil document
claims that both the Fourth International and the
Trotskyist program were "destroyed" during World War II
and consequently must be "reconstructed" anew.

Following their expulsion from the Spartacusbund the
comrades of the TF began extensive political discussions
with the Trotzkistische Liga Deutschlands, German
section of the international Spartacist tendency. At the
beginning of February 1977 the two organizations fused.

The Fifth National Conference stated: "The Spartacus-
bund must break radically with its nationally limited
past . . . ." This desire to break with the "national Trotsky-
ism" of the early Spartacusbund (and of the KJO
[Kommunistischen Jungendorganisation] and BL
[Spartacus/Bolschewiki-Leninisten]) was a positive
impulse— as was the stated wish to put an end to the

"practice of unprincipled propaganda blocs" and to
"politics beneath the level of the Transitional Program,"
which also found expression in the "Resolution of the Fifth
NC" (Spartacus No. 19, August 1975).

Such a break with the practice of the past was and is
particularly pressing in view of genuine possibilities for a
Trotskyist regroupment on an international scale. In the
period after the Tenth World Congress there occurred a
number of "cold" splits, after effects of the Chilean defeat,
between the European-led majority of the USec [United
Secretariat of the Fourth International — USFI] and the
SWP [Socialist Workers Party]-led minority (Argentina,
Australia, Canada, USA, etc.). In addition, the interna-
tional "Third Tendency" for the most part dissolved:
elements of it have capitulated to the majority (as with the
Kompass tendency in the GIM [Gruppe Internationale
Marxisten]), have gone over to the SWP faction (parts of
"Tendency Four" in the LCR [Ligue Communiste
Revolutionnaire] and parts of the Italian FMR [Frazione
Marxista Rivoluzionaria]) or have either split or been
expelled (the Roberto wing of the FMR, etc.). Finally,
groupings from the USec have gone over to the iSt, as with
a wing of the FMR, several groupings from the LCR, etc.

At present the opportunities for programmatic regroup-
ment are perhaps even more favorable than last year. The
Maoist Stalinists have been plunged into a process of
political fermentation by the events in China and are
obviously beginning to fragment. In the course of the year
the SWP-PST [Partido Socialista de los Trabajadores]
bloc has broken up and the general crisis of the USec has
intensified (Mandel announces his willingness to put aside
"labels" like the "Fourth International" should his
revisionist appetites demand this). Since its support for
Mitterrand in 1974, the OCI [Organisation Communiste
Internationaliste] has been moving rapidly to the right: it is
casting amorous eyes at the SWP, publishes its weekly
paper Informations Ouvrieres not as a party organ but
rather as a "free tribune of class struggle" and is
increasingly incapable of drawing the class line in its
solidarity campaigns for those being politically persecuted
in East Europe (the reformist I AK [Internationale Arbeiter
Korrespondenz], without a tradition and base, merely
presents the opportunist tendencies of the Lambertistes in a
particularly crass form). The Healyites are sinking lower
than ever before with their gangster tactics, their slanders
of Hansen and Novack, their celebration of Libyan
"socialism," and the fact that they have been able to set up
their national office in Essen can be ascribed only to the
pitiful weakness of the Spartacusbund.

This situation requires an international tactic of
continued on page 22

SPARTAaST

NUMBER 24

AUTUMN 1977

50 CENTS

Class Opposition to Popular Fronts— Key to
Revolutionary Regroupment

Chilean OTR Fuses with
Spartacist Tendency

—reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 172,
9 September 1977

The 1977 European summer camp of the international
Spartacist tendency (iSt) witnessed a fusion which is
unique in the history of the iSt and of considerable interest
and significance to would-be revolutionists throughout the
world. The Organizacion Trotskista Revolucionaria
(OTR) of Chile united with the iSt, and is now the Chilean
sympathizing section of our common tendency. While the
proportions on both sides are modest, this fusion
represents a ringing affirmation and confirmation of
Trotsky's 1935 remark that: "In reality, the Popular Front
is the main question of Proletarian class strategy for this
epoch." The OTR and iSt met on the common terrain of
militant class opposition to bourgeois popular frontism,
and it was by generalizing this position of proletarian inde-
pendence to all major international questions that a joining
of our forces became possible and necessary.

For the iSt this fusion marks a significant extension of
our tendency, as it is the first Latin American section. It
thus represents the addition of an important body of
revolutionary experience to a movement previously limited
to sections in North America, Europe and Australasia. For
the OTR it signifies the overcoming of national isolation
and the culmination of its break with Pabloism begun some
years before. While holding firm to their opposition to
popular frontism, the Chilean comrades have proven
capable of uncompromisingly reevaluating their past views
in the light of international experience, the indispensable
precondition for assimilating authentic Leninism. For
anyone familiar with the continental parochialism and
rampant revisionism of Latin American "Trotskyism," this
is a tremendous achievement.

But the central significance of the OTR/iSt fusion is to
underline the Trotskyist analysis of the popular front, the
tying of the working masses to "progressive" capitalists —
or even "phantom" capitalists (provincial lawyers and the
like) when the real bourgeoisie in its entirety has staked its
existence on the triumph of naked reaction — with the
purpose of preventing a proletarian uprising against all
wings of the bourgeois class enemy. A tragically prophetic
article in Spartacist in the fall of 1970 warned that the
AUende coalition, the Unidad Popular(UP), was a popular
front such as in France, Spain and Chile during the 1930's,
and must be resolutely opposed by proletarian revolution-
ists. At a time when millions of Chileans and leftists
throughout the world were hailing the "companero presi-
dente" and talking of a second Cuba, we wrote: "Any
'critical support' to the Allende coalition is class treason,
paving the way for a bloody defeat for the Chilean working
people when domestic reaction, abetted by international
imperialism, is ready."

In reality, this seemingly prescient statement was neither
especially original nor did it require a crystal ball. We were
simply repeating the lesson of Spain, acting as any Leninist
party should, as the memory of the working class. It would
seem to be the ABC of Trotskyism, yet every other
international tendency which claims that heritage managed
to obscure or directly deny the popular-front character of
the Allende regime.

Within Chile, the groups to the left of the Communist
and Socialist parties were disoriented by the 1970 UP
election victory. The most notorious case was that of the
Castroite MIR (Movimiento de Izquierda Revoluciona-
ria— Movement of the Revolutionary Left) which flip-
flopped from guerrillaist opposition to participation in

coniinuecl on page 2

Theses on Ireland 16

4

SPARTACIST

Chilean OTR Fuses with
Spartacist Tendency ...

(continued from pa(^e 3)

Pinochet coup; but unlike those who seek to reconstruct
the decimated MIR, or the USec majority which is mainly
concerned to cover its own tracks of total support to
Guevarist guerrillaism, the OTR has drawn the lessons of
the terrible defeat represented by September 1 1 and
proclaimed the bankruptcy of guerrillaism in all its
varieties.

Leninism on the Organization Question

In Chile the OTR lacked Leninist organizational norms:
the definition of membership was fluid, it never had a party
press, etc. This organizational practice was naturally
maintained in exile, where the pressures toward a "circle
spirit" among a small band of survivors are enormous.
Nevertheless, as the OTR evolved toward the Spartacist
tendency this, equally naturally, led to internal struggles
and splits. These are, however, difficult to resolve without
assimilating and applying the Leninist norms of democrat-
ic centralism. It was problems centering around the
organization question that for some months held up the
fusion perspective that had been voted in May 1976 and
which dominated the activity of the OTR in the last year.
As Cde. Ivan of the OTR put it in a presentation to a
meeting of the International Executive Committee (lEC) of
the iSt at the 1977 European summer camp:

"The OTR was an organization in exile and dispersed over
various continents. Basically there were two questions which
impeded fusion last year. One was the organizational
weakness of the OTR, which as a result led us to a federative
concept of the party. But behind this was an important
political point, and that is that the OTR hoped to unite its
central cadre in Europe. We had difficulties in bringing about
a joint development of all our cadre, and the European
nucleus did not have a Leninist methodology to overcome
this problem."

The difficulties centered on the struggle to win over an
important member of the leadership who had only recently
arrived from Latin America. Finding himself cut off from a
base and confined to the limitations of a small Trotskyist
propaganda nucleus, this comrade began elaborating plans

behind the backs of the leadership; acts of organizational
indiscipline soon led to an open political break, as he failed
to defend the OTR program publicly, breaking explicit
instructions. As the OTR reporter noted in his presentation
to the lEC:

"...in the final analysis Cde. Bias presented a perspective
which was counterposed to Trotskyism and to Lenin's
concept of the party, basing himself on the argument that we

can't break our ties with the masses Thus in practice he

was incapable of defending the entirety of the communist
program

"A few days ago this process came to an end, and in a task
carried out in full consultation with the comrades from the
International we formalized Bias' split from the Trotskyist
program. For the OTR, the most important thing in this
process was that the break with our past methodology
opened the path to genuine Leninism."

An Iskra Perspective

The OTR now faces tremendous opportunities and
responsibilities. The Chilean bonapartist junta, lacking a
significant social base of support and having been unable to
atomize the proletariat and wipe out its leadership, will not
last even as long as the Brazilian military dictatorship. In
the meantime, those leftists who survived the bloodbath
have been concentrated in large numbers in exile centers in
Europe and Latin America. Here there is an extraordinary
opportunity to reach tens of thousands of committed
militants and to challenge the left to seriously draw a
balance sheet of the Allende regime. This is by no means
limited to Chilean militants, for the Chilean Qxperience has
global importance and is decisive for the formation of
revolutionary nuclei in the key countries of Latin America.

Among those who reject the popular front, Stalinism,
social democracy and guerrillaism a dialogue could be
initiated. Through polemical combat the superiority pf the
Trotskyist analysis and program can be demonstrated, and
the core of an authentic Leninist propaganda group forged
and politically prepared for the tasks which will face it
when the bloody Pinochet dictatorship falls and the crucial
battle to break the working class from the reformists begins
in earnest.

Key to this perspective is the question of the press. In the
coming period the principal voice for the OTR will be the
Spanish edition of Spartacist, to be published three times a

SPARTACIST

An Organ of Revolutionary Marxism

• Spartacist, deutsche Ausgabe
$0.60

• Spartacist, English edition
$0.50

• Spartacist, Edition tran^ise
$0.60

• Spartacist, edicl6n en espaflol
$0.60

ORDER FROM/PAY TO:
Spartacist Publishing Co.
Box 1377, GPO
New York, NY 10001, USA

AUTUMN 1977

5

year, whose editorial board now includes members of the
OTR. This is intended to be an Iskra-lype publication,
including polemics and analyses directed primarily at the
Latin American exile milieu and to leftists in the Iberian
peninsula. In addition the OTR will work toward the
initiation of its own press, beginning in a modest format
and with irregular frequency. Along with the struggle to
build a solid, programmatically united and politically
homogeneous organization in exile will naturally come the
difficult task of attempting to get this press into the hands
of the militants of the Chilean working class wherever they
are.

In all this, as a member of a democratic-centralist
international tendency, the OTR will count on the full
political support and all possible material assistance of the
iSt. But there is no denying that the demands are enormous
and our total resources qualitatively inadequate. However,
the OTR has an important political capital which cannot be
minimized: unlike the pseudo-Trotskyists, it represents a
coherent and powerful political line which was, tragically,
proven correct by the demise of the deadly popular front.

Chile 1970-73 has had an impact on the political
development of the current revolutionary generation
similar to that of the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930's.
The Trotskyists who warned that the popular front was
leading to a bloody massacre should recall their warnings
to educate those who did not heed them at the time but
desire to avoid a repeat of thp holocaust. Yet Mandel's
USec and the OCTs "Organizing Committee" hide their
Chilean groups rather than highlighting them — and for
good reason: they did not issue such warnings but instead
apologized for the popular front.

We are still weak as a political force, but the strength and
promise of the OTR/iSt fusion— what enabled these
militants to cross the tremendous gulf from Pabloism,
workerism, Guevarism to Trotskyism—comes from the
fact that it is built on fundamental Marxist principles:
"To face reality squarely; not to seek the line of least
resistance; to call things by their right names; to speak the
truth to the masses, no matter how bitter it may be; not to
fear obstacles; to be true in little things as in big ones; to base
one's program on the logic of the class struggle; to be bold
when the hour for action arrives — these are the rules of the
Fourth International."*

Declaration of Fraternal Relations

between the international Spartacist tendency
and tlie Organizacidn Trotskista Revolucionaria

ofCliile

^reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. Ill,
28 May 1976

I

The events of 1970 to 1973 in Chile posed, and continue
to pose, a fundamental test of the revolutionary capacity of
all who claim to speak in the historic interests of the
working class. The self-proclaimed socialists who bound
the exploited masses to the "constitutionalist" officers and
"anti-imperialist" bourgeoisie through the Popular Unity
(UP) coalition acted as a roadblock to revolution, and
therefore an accomplice of counterrevolution. The first
task of those who would prepare a proletarian insurrection
to sweep away the bourgeois state, today in the hands of the
blood-drenched Pinochet dictatorship, must be to draw the
lessons of the AUende popular front. Only in this manner
can the masses be broken from their treacherous reformist
and centrist misleaders who paved the way for the coup of
II September 1973. At that time the bourgeois popular
front was replaced by another form of capitalist rule, the
bonapartist military junta, which balances between the
fractions and cliques of the middle and big bourgeoisie,
reflecting the pressure of the major imperialist powers.
Already in late 1970 the Spartacist tendency warned:
"It is the most elementary duty for revolutionary Marxists to
irreconcilably oppose the Popular Front in the election and
to place absolutely no confidence in it in power. Any 'critical
support' to the Allende coalition is class treason, paving the

way for a bloody defeat for the Chilean working people when
domestic reaction, abetted by international imperialism, is
ready."

Tragically, there was no Trotskyist party in Chile to
galvanize the workers around the Marxist program of class
independence, and the Spartacist warning proved all too
accurate.

II

As Trotsky remarked in 1935: "In reality, the Popular
Front is the main question of Proletarian class strategy for
this epoch. It also offers the best criterion for the difference
between Bolshevism and Menshevism."

The largest purportedly revolutionary organization
formally outside the UP coalition, the MIR (Revolution-
ary Left Movement), was incapable of presenting a class
opposition to the popular front. While attracting a layer of
militant youth fundamentally from the petty bourgeoisie,
and periodically criticizing the Communist Party (CP), the
MIR never broke from the Popular Unity. Following the
September 1970 elections it called on the masses to support
Allende; today the MIR is part of the popular front in exile,
seeking to "broaden" the class-collaborationist coalition by
including even Christian Democrats. The individual
heroism of many MIR militants cannot hide the political
bankruptcy of these Chilean Castroites, the left cover of the
popular front.

Nor did the Chilean disciples of the several self-
continued on next page

6

SPARTACIST

iSt/OTR Declaration of
Fraternal Relations...

(continued from page 5)

proclaimed "Fourth Internationals" present a Trotskyist
policy of irreconcilable hostility to popular frontism. The
sympathizers of the "United" Secretariat (USec) were
either mired in perpetual "deep entry" in the Socialist Party
(the traditional graveyard for pseudo-Trotskyists in Chile)
or fawningly crawling after the MIR. (In fact, the USec
played a central role in creating the MIR, but this did not
prevent the Castroites from summarily expelling them two
years later for "Trotskyism." Such are the rewards of
opportunism!) The USec supporters labeled the bourgeois
I elements of the UP irrelevant, alibiing the Allende regime
with the label "reformist" and calling on it to carry out its
own bourgeois program.

As for the two Chile groups adhering to the "Organizing
Committee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth Interna-
tional" led by the French OCI. neither of them character-
ized the UP as a popular front until after the Pinochet
coup; and the minuscule Posadista group considered the
Allende regime as a "revolutionary government," a
category in which it also includes the military juntas of
Peru and Panama.

iir

However, some militants in Chile did seek to oppose the
class collaboration of the two dominant reformist, or as
Lenin said, bourgeois workers parties (Communist and
Socialist). In late 1972, elements of the TRO (Revolution-
ary October Tendency, allied with the reformist interna-
tional minority of the USec) refused to go along with a
fusion with the FRT (Revolutionary Trotskyist Front, led
by L. Vitale and allied with the centrist USec majority)
because of the failure to resolve (or even discuss)
differences on Cuba and guerrillaism, and the lack of a
revolutionary policy toward the UP. Consequently, this
grouping was immediately expelled by the central
committee elected at the founding congress of the PSR
(Revolutionary Socialist Party) amid charges of "ultra-
leftism."

The expelled tendency, which became the Revolutionary
Trotskyist Organization (OTR), includes among its central
leadership trade unionists with many years of experience
leading struggles of the Chilean miners, both against the
U.S. monopolies and state agencies of the Chilean
bourgeoisie. Having broken with the SP, in the March 1973
legislative elections they called for votes to the Popular
Socialist Union (USOPO), a split-off from the SP, while
giving it no political confidence. Although the USOPO
leaders were reformists, they had been forced to break with
the popular front because of leftist opposition among
copper miners (its base) to the UP. Shortly before the
Pinochet coup leaders of the OTR were at the head of a
workers march in Santiago demanding "break with the
bourgeoisie."

Subsequently, in a document approved by its congress in
October 1974, "A Political Defeat and the Need for a
Balance Sheet," the OTR wrote:

"To say that the character of the UP was reformist means
being an accomplice to the betrayals committed. . . . Thus the

UP must be included in the list of the old popular fronts, the
model designed to betray the working class."

IV

At the time of the shotgun wedding which formed the
PSR in November 1972, the tendency which became the
Revolutionary Trotskyist Organization of Chile had
already experienced the unprincipled maneuvering of the
competing factions of the USec. In exile, the OTR came
into direct contact with the United Secretariat leadership.
Although invited to the USec's "Tenth World Congress," it
was informed that there would be no discussion on Chile!
This was only logical for a fake-International which had
formally declared the Allende regime a popular front in
1971, while none of its sympathizing groups in Chile ever
held this position; and then, following the 1973 coup,
posthumously rehabilitated the UP to -the status of
"reformist." Clearly any honest balance sheet of the
Chilean events could only be a condemnation of the USec's
own opportunism and failure to present a revolutionary
opposition to class collaboration.

The OCI, like the USec, had termed the Allende regime a
popular front (although not taking the decisive step of
calling for electoral opposition to all the parties of the UP
coalition) while its Chilean supporters failed to make this
characterization. In discussions with the OCI, the OTR
sharply rejected the former's call for a vote for Mitterrand
(candidate of the popular-front Union of the Left in the
1974 French presidential elections) and opposed the OCI
policy of tailing after the Portuguese Socialist Party. In
1971, after playing a fundamental role in frustrating
chances for a Bolivian revolution by its capitulatory
centrist policies, the OCI's main Latin American ally, the
POR of G. Lora, concluded a political pact with the ousted
Bolivian ex-president. General Torres. Subsequently the
OCI has called for extending this alliance with the "anti-
imperialist" bourgeoisie to a continental scale — a Latin
American super-Kuomintang. Such treacherous policies
demonstrate the appetites of these pseudo-Trotskyists to
commit betrayals as monstrous as those of the Chilean SP
and CP.

Coming into contact with the international Spartacist
tendency (iSt), the OTR found itself in fundamental
agreement with the iSt's consistent class opposition to the
popular front, put forward in positions taken even at the
height of Allende's popularity and expressed in the articles
collected in Cuademos Marxistas No. 3 ("Chile: Lecciones
del Frente Popular"). This initial agreement was extended
to include the understanding of the nature of Cuba as a
bureaucratically deformed workers state. The opportunists
of the United Secretariat formed their pseudo-
International on the basis of capitulating to Castro's
popularity among petty-bourgeois radicals, terming Cuba
a healthy workers state that merely "lack[ed] the forms" of
proletarian democracy. In contrast, the forerunner of the
Spartacist League/ U.S., the Revolutionary Tendency
(RT) of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party (SWP), insisted
that Cubanvas a deformed workers state, and that workers
democracy could only be achieved through, political
revolution led by a Trotskyist party. It was for defending
this Marxist program that the RT was expelled by the
SWP, as part of the latter's rapid degeneration through
centrism to cringing social-democratic reformism.

AUTUMN 1977

7

Through a discussion of the history of the international
Trotskyist movement, the USec capitulation to Castroism
was traced to the Pabloist liquidationism which had
destroyed the Fourth International in 1951-53.

V

Among the earlier political positions, inherited from
Paloism, which the OTR had to reevaluate, the question
of guerrillaism was the most difficult. While in the TRO,
the tendency which became the OTR had been strongly
guerrillaist, accusing the TRO leadership of failure to carry
out the decision of the U See's "Ninth World Congress" on
"armed struggle" in Latin America. While the OTR had
rejected peasant-based "foco" guerrilla war, it stood for
guerrilla struggle by the workers.

In discussions with the iSt, the OTR came to the
conclusion that Marxists must oppose guerrillaism. As the
Revolutionary Tendency stated in 1963, "Experience since
the Second World War has demonstrated that peasant-
based guerrilla warfare under petit-bourgeois leadership
can in itself lead to nothing more than an anti-working
class bureaucratic regime" ("Toward the Rebirth of the
Fourth International"). Moreover, whether in rural or
urban (Tupamaros) forms, whether as Guevarism, Maoist
"people's war" or in a "Trotskyist" disguise (as in the case of
the Argentine PRT/ERP), guerrillaism is hostile to
proletarian revolution and inevitably leads to — or is the
reflection of — Stalinist "two-stage" conceptions if not
outright petty-bourgeois nationalism.

The proletariat cannot sustain guerrilla war, for the very
concept implies the absence of a revolutionary situation
and the kind of irregular fighting which requires an ability
to retreat rapidly. In addition to its clear class interest, it is
the organization of the proletariat which gives it political
superiority over the atomized peasantry. This organization
is the result of the position of the working class in the
structure of capitalist society; to retreat into the hills would
eventually destroy the class or the class character of its
vanguard.

There is no better illustration of the impotence of
guerrillaism in the face of a concerted offensive by the
bourgeoisie than the recent debacle in Argentina. Even
though guerrillaism (both urban and rural) is more
widespread, better financed and equipped, of longer
duration and of more different varieties than anywhere else
in Latin America, none of the guerrilla groups could lift a
finger against the Videla coup or even stop the notorious
AAA death squads which have assassinated thousands of
leftists and workers leaders with impunity over the last
three years.

The revolutionary party must, of course, take an active
role in oi-ganizing the self-defense of the working masses,
and the use of guerrilla tactics is often vital as a subordinate
civil war tactic. However, the road to power for the
proletariat is through mass insurrection against the
bourgeois state; the central military organization of the
uprising must be an arm of and directed by the mass
organization of the working class, led by the Leninist
vanguard party.

VI

In Latin America, Castroist-inspired guerrillaism has led
a generation of subjectively revolutionary militants from

one defeat to another, resulting in the useless slaughter of
many of the most dedicated and courageous fighters. In
numerous countries, thousands of militants have been
grievously misled by the Trotskyist pretensions of the
Pabloists and other revisionists into capitulation before
non-proletarian leaderships.

We reject the claims of the several international
groupings posturing as the Fourth International to be the
continuity, either organizationally or politically, of the
revolutionary organization founded by Leon Trotsky in
1938. The Chilean experience has again demonstrated the
bankruptcy of these pseudo-Trotskyist impostors. Those
who in 1970-73 were giving a left cover to Allende's
Popular Unity, only a year later were creating illusions in
the Portuguese Armed Forces Movement and/ or its SP
and CP collaborators. After playing a central role in
creating the MIR, only to be expelled from its creature
shortly after, the USec repeated this disastrous course with
the debacle of the guerrillaist Argentine PRT/ ERP, at the
same time sustaining the social-democratic PST, which
politically supported the Peronist government. Only an
authentically Trotskyist International, firmly based on the
theory of permanent revolution and committed to
destroying the authority of all the reformist and centrist
misleaders of the working class, can resolve the crisis of
proletarian leadership.

In view of the large number of subjectively revolutionary
militants presently within the ranks of various ostensibly
revolutionary organizations and the central importance of
politically destroying Pabloism on a world scale, the
Revolutionary Trotskyist Organization and the interna-
tional Spartacist tendency, in this declaration of fraternal
relations, agree to undertake joint work toward the rebirth
of the Fourth International. We seek to reforge the Fourth
International by winning the best cadre and militants
through a process of revolutionary regroupment. On the
basis of the above points and agreement with the
Declaration of Principles of the Spartacist League/ U.S.,
subsequently adopted by the iSt, the parties to this
declaration aim at achieving the unity of the Revolutionary
Trotskyist Organization of Chile with the international
Spartacist tendency, and in turn this will be a great step
toward the formation of the International Trotskyist
League, worldwide in scope.

17 May 1976

[ WORKCRS

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8

British Troops Out of Northern ireland

SPARTACIST

Workers Must Crush Sectarian
Terror

by David Strachan

—reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 156,
6 May 1977

IVe prim below the edited text of a talk by Comrade
Strachan of the London Spartacist Group, delivered at a
Spartacist l^a^ue forum in New York on March 14.

Our topic tonight is "Leninism, the National Question
and Ireland." Why Ireland? It's a fairly small place, only
about four million people. The death rate is very low-
much, much lower than Lebanon or Cyprus recently. In
fact the murder rate in Glasgow presently is much higher
than in Northern Ireland, and I imagine it's much higher
still in New York. So why Ireland?

Well, first of all, the fact that things are very quiet there at
the moment does not indicate relative social peace. There
are between 15,000 and 20,000 British troops in Northern

Ireland. It is a very fragile social peace imposed by the brute
force of the British army. And if the British army were
removed immediately, the prospect would be one of
massive bloodshed.

There is a more important reason which we've had to
deal with in London, and that is the impact in Britain. The
question of Ireland is a crucial test of the revolutionary
integrity of the British left-wing groups, and the ability to
analy/e Ireland is a touchstone for self-proclaimed
Marxists everywhere. Currently the question of Ireland
provides a crucial test, and I believe a confirmation, of the
unique position of the international Spartacist tendency in
upholding Leninism on the national question.

For internationalist communists who reject the simple,
ultimately genocidal logic of the nationalists, the complex
situation in Ireland may seem to be utterly intractable.
Lhcre have been SOO years of English oppression in Ireland
and we have a situation there todav which combines

British occupation forces: mission "pacification."

Donald McCullln/Magnum

AUTUMN 1977

9

features which have been classically associated with a
variety of types of colonial and imperial oppression. The
situation in Northern Ireland resembles in some ways the
classic colonial situation, in which a colonial administra-
tion administers, oppresses and exploits the native
population. But it also resembles the situation where you
have a colonial settler people who wipe out or expel the
original native population. And. as well, it resembles the
features which are classically associated with the multi-
national empires in eastern Europe.

However, tonight, rather than giving a run-down of the
history of Ireland and an up-to-date account of the current
events there, 1 want to concentrate on the programmatic
questions.

British Troops Out!

Toward the middle of last year the eminent British
historian A.J. P. Taylor was interviewed on the BBC. He
had a number of things to say that considerably disturbed
bourgeois opinion in Britain. He said quite simply and
bluntly that the British should get the hell out of Ireland.
He said that the presence of the British army fundamentally
oppresses the Catholic Irish people and that nothing
progressive can come through the presence of the British
army. So 1 want to start by asserting that an essential plank
for any revolutionary analysis and program for Ireland
must be the demand for the immediate, unconditional
withdrawal of the British army.

That should be obvious to revolutionists, but unfortu-
nately it isn't very widely held. In the British Labour Party,
with all its "lefts," who are forever willing to sign this and
that petition and to take up this and that socialist cause
which is as remote as possible from their immediate
interests, there is not one MP [Member of Parliament], no
matter how left he claims to be, who is clearly for the
immediate, unconditional withdrawal of the British army.
The Communist Party of Great Britain [CPGB] has a
position that the British army should withdraw to the
barracks. The "Official" wing of the IRA has a position
that the British army should withdraw from working-class
areas; and a number of other organizations, including the
"Provisional" IRA, have a position that the British army
should set a date for its withdrawal.

Even among the organizations of the far left, the
ostensibly Trotskyist organizations, there is a readiness to
abandon this essential plank. For example the Internation-
al Marxist Group [IMG], the fraternal organization of the
American Socialist Workers Party [SWP], which was
formerly on the extreme left of the United Secretariat, is
currently moving more and more rightward. At the time of
the Bloody Sunday commemoration marches last year it
had a position not for the immediate, unconditional
withdrawal but for "End British Involvement," a nice
vague plank. They hoped through this to attract some
sympathy from the Communist Party. They didn't, but
their willingness to take up some vague slogan like this in
order to get a little bit closer to the Communist Party is
indicative not only of their opportunism but of their
inability to confront and stand up against British
imperialism.

It should also be obvious that the "Troops Out" demand
by itself will riot solve the problem. The historian Taylor
recognizes this to his credit. He says that, of course, there

will be some sort of settlement reached after the troops get
out: but then he was asked if he thought there would be
unity of the people on the island. His answer was that this is
a matter of relative strength. He acknowledges that the
solution may be imposed by one party or another. He
acknowledges that civil wars and bloodshed can solve these
questions.

Now almost all the British groups of the far left present
the "Troops Out" demand either as having some inherently
revolutionary connotations or else as an application of the
demand for self-determination for the Irish people as a
whole. The assumption that if you just demand "Troops
Out" everything will go fine is tied to their understanding of
the applicability of the demand for self-determination in
Ireland.

I want to take as an example the International Marxist
Group again. It says in one, of the IMG newspapers, "The
right of Ireland to national freedom is merely the basic
democratic right of all oppressed peoples to determine their
own destiny, free from all outside interference and control.
It means the right to control their own economy, decide on
their own political system in relation with other countries
and the right to develop their own national culture."

That is not the Leninist position on self-determination.
Leninists are opposed to all forms of national oppression
and to all national privileges. The right of self-
determination means simply the right to establish your own
political state. It does not say anything about economic
independence, dr about some conception of Utopian
freedom from outside interference.

In the general sense the demand for self-determination is
unconditional. That is, we do not when we raise it place
conditions with regard to the question of the class nature of
the state that emerges or of the leadership. However, the
demand is not a categorical imperative to be raised
everywhere and at all times, even for oppressed nations. It
is a subordinate part of the whole revolutionary program.
It is one of a range of bourgeois-democratic demands
which must be a part, but only a part, of the revolutionary
program.

So we can recognize the right of self-determination for a
nation and then argue against its exercise. For instance,
that is the position of the international Spartacist tendency
at this time with regard to Quebec. The demand must be
subordinate to the overall considerations of the class
struggle.

No to Sectarian Slaughter!

I wanted to make these points to establish that the
demand for self-determination is not something that must
always be raised. It has to be evaluated in terms of the
general considerations of the class struggle. And, in
particular, where the exercise of self-determination for one
people means that they will, in fact, deny that right to
another people, then it ceases to be a democratic demand.
This arises with interpenetrated peoples, where two peoples
are living intermingled on the same territory.

I want to argue that this is the case in Ireland, that if you
simply demand self-determination (a demand which does
not transcend the bounds of capitalism), you are condemn-
ing the working masses to further rounds of communal
bloodshed, massive population transfers and genocide.

continued on next page

10

SPARTACIST

Northern Ireland...

(continued from page 9)

Those who want to argue that in Ireland the crucial
demand is "self-determination for the Irish nation" must
face the implications of what they are saying. That is, they
are for the forcible reunification of the island under a
bourgeois regime, irrespective of the wishes of the
Protestants.

Many of the British left-wing groups don't want to face
up to this, so they argue that there's some transcendental
dynamic that will make everything work out fine. Sixty
percent of the population of Northern Ireland — a quarter
of the population of the whole island— will just give up or
get caught up in this revolutionary dynamic and, as the
IMG claims, "The working class will have the opportunity
to unite for socialism and peace." Just like that!

It ought to be obvious to everyone but the most myopic
and the most nationalist that getting the troops out will not
by itself solve things. There are more than 100,000
registered guns in Ulster. The vast majority of them are in
the hands of the Protestants who are well-trained, well-
organized and quite determined. As the "Unionist" slogan
goes, "Ulster will fight. Ulster will be right." And they very
well might win, certainly against the IRA and even against
the Irish regular army.

The reality of the situation is that a number of
possibilities are posed if the British troops get out. There
can be the consolidation of a Protestant "Zionist" state,
accompanied by forcible population transfers, genocide,
etc. There could be a reversal of the terms of oppression.
That is, the Irish Catholic state consolidated on the whole
island, with the Protestants becoming the new Palestinians.
There could be a situation like Cyprus, a new boundary
change.

We should also keep in mind what happened in Lebanon,
where the most "progressive" Arab state, Syria, the
supposed best friends of the Palestinian liberation
movement, intervened and blocked with the Christians to
smash the Moslem forces. No doubt it will turn around and
smash the Christian forces as well. The Irish Catholic state
might act in the very same way: intervene in Northern
Ireland (with, of course, the support of British imperial-
ism), smash the radical Irish nationalists and then turn on
the Protestants. After all, the Irish bourgeoisie has already
fought a civil war with the more radical nationalists, so why
shouldn't that happen?

Now I don't want to speculate on what is the most likely
possibility. All these possibilities pose the likelihood of
massive communal bloodshed. So I want to stress that the
"Troops Out" demand must be linked to a revolutionary,
communist program that can set the basis for working-
class unity.

Britain Playing the Orange Card?

In association with the call for "Troops Out" and the
false assumption that this will lead to the collapse of
Protestant opposition, there is an argument that mainte-
nance of the artificial Orange statelet, the six counties of
Ulster, is absolutely essential to the interests of British
imperialism in Ireland. So I want to look briefly at the
motivations of (and tensions within) British imperialism.
It's clear, at this point, that the Northern Ireland statelet is

not necessarily part of the British strategy in Ireland. They
have used the Orange card in the past but it's a nuisance
today.

British imperialism's approach to Ireland has always
been much more complicated than the simplistic analyses
that are often put forward. Up to 1912 the liberal wing of
the bourgeoisie was aiming for a near-colonial "independ-
ent" state. This was stopped and opposed by a block of the
Protestants, the officer corps of the British army and the
landed aristocracy. Nowadays the border is anachronistic
to the general intentions of British imperialism. It gets in
the way of business: the desire to invest in the south and the
fact that the industry in the north is decaying, run down.

They have a problem. If they try to hand over Northern
Ireland to the southern Republic they are going to run into
a civil war, because the Irish Catholic bourgeoisie is not
strong enough to control the situation. And given the
hostility of the Protestants there will be one. So what
British imperialism is trying to do is continue business as
usual, invest as much as possible and try and keep the lid on
things.

They made a big attempt last year at power-sharing, to
get the moderate Catholics and the moderate Protestants
together, that failed due to opposition from the Protestant
hard-liners. So they are now trying a mixture of economic
pressure, increasing the power of the police forces and
agencies in Northern Ireland (for instance, rearming the
Royal Ulster Constabulary) and calculated use of the
British army. The result is that Ian Paisley, the most
prominent mass leader of the Ulster Unionists, currently
accuses the British government of conducting psychologi-
cal warfare against the Protestants. Just to give you an idea
of the discrepancy between the interests of British
imperialism and the Ulster Protestants, if you look at the
figures of March last year for political prisoners in
Northern I reland, there were 900 Roman Catholics and 600
Protestants. It indicates that there's not exactly agreement
between the militant Ulstermen and British imperialism at
this time.

What Are the Protestants?

The key question is what are the Protestants. There are a
number of ways to avoid this question, and you will find
that they have all been tried by various left-wing
organizations. One way is to say that the Protestants are
just backward workers, and then follow tfiis up with lots of
"unite and fight" talk and vague rhetoric about how the
dynamic of the class struggle will solve everything. That is,
you don't address the communal and national divisions at
all. Another way is to adopt the real position of the extreme
Irish nationalists and to say, in effect, they are just agents of
British imperialism, so drive them into the sea. Or if you're
a little bit shamefaced about it you say something along the
lines of, "I can't tell the Irish people what to do."

There's a variety of other excuses put forward for
plumping for the Catholic nationalists, the Republicans,
and I would like to run through them briefly. There's the
argument, for example, that only oppressed people have
the right to self-determination. Now that is not so at all.
For Marxists all nations have the right to self-
determination. But the problem with raising the demand
for self-determination in Ireland is that it doesn't resolve
the Catholic-Protestant conflict in a democratic manner.

AUTUMN 1977

11

Obviously, when India was lighting to separate from
Britain, British self-determination wasn't in question. In
that situation it would be a reactionary slogan, just as it
would be if the (iermans and the British each argued that
they were fighting WWII on the basis of their right of self-
determination.

But in the case of interpenetrated peoples, where one or
the other is likely to be immediately cither the oppressed
nation or else the privileged nation under imperialism, it's a
lot more complicated. There arc two peoples here and
whatever way you work it, if the oppressed gets its self-
determination under capitalism, then it will simply become
the new oppressor. There's no equitable solution within
that framework. And if you want to say that only the
oppressed people have the right to self-determination, then
you're really saying that what happens to the Protestants
after self-determination in Ireland doesn't matter at all,
because after all right now the Irish nationalists are
progressive and the Protestants are reactionary and that's
the end of it. Too bad, Protestants!

I here's another argument, to the effect that L.oyalism
(which is the common term to describe the Protestant
communalist ideology) is simply an imperialist ideology.
That is, it's just really British chauvinism given a little
slightly different tinge in order to attract a mass following
amongst a certain misled section of the Irish workers.

I don't think any of these arguments 1 just dealt with
deserve serious attention from Marxists. But there are
some other arguments which attempt to present a more
sophisticated Marxoid type of analysis. The one that's
most frequently heard is that the Protestants are a labor
aristocracy. This theory is essentially the same one as the
New Left guilt theories about the American white working
class being bought off because of "white skin privilege."

To begin with it ignores the fact that, with or without the
Catholic population, in Northern Ireland you have one of
the highest unemployment rates in Britain, and the fact that
housing for the whole of the working-class population in
Northern Ireland is the worst in Britain and amongst the
worst in Europe. It also grievously distorts Marxism. The
term "labor aristocracy" was used by Lenin in a very precise
way, to indicate a layer of the working class, largely trade-
union bureaucrats, that had sold out. To describe the whole
of the Protestant working class, including the large
percentage unemployed, as a labor aristocracy is obviously
not just an extension but a gross distortion of the meaning
of that Marxist term.

Thirdly, it suggests that the Protestants are nothing else
but a stratum of one class, ignoring the fact that the
Protestants are a trans-class grouping. With that method-
ology you would have to look at the tsarist empire before
the Russian Revolution and argue that the Great Russians

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and the Poles were labor aristocracies. After all they
enjoyed relative privileges if you want to put it that way.
I hey were better off they were more advanced sections of
the society. You'd have to say on those grounds that,
because the Poles were amongst the most advanced and
had privileges compared to so many other peoples in the
tsarist Emipire, they didn't have a right to self-
determination! But of course, the people who have such
arguments like to avoid these little problems.

New Left Moralism

In association with these attempts to explain why we
don't have to worry about the fate of the Protestants, there
are two other things i want to look at. One is the argument
that the Ulster state is an artificial imperialist creation, that
its borders were designed to ensure a Protestant majority.
Now that's true, and prior to the partition, revolutionists in
Ireland would have fought for a unified independent
Ireland and to transcend the sectional differences that
existed at the time.

But with the partition and thecommunal bloodshed that
accompanied it, with the establishment of a bourgeois Irish
republic and the state boundaries, to argue for unification
after that point is to ignore what had clearly become
consolidated communal differences. This argument often
goes with the position that not only was it an imperialist
partition but, as well, the Protestants are a colonial-settler
people. You know, they threw out the native people, they
don't really have a right to be there. So, the American
people don't have a right to be here now; you've all got to go
home. The Australian people don't have a right to be there;
they've all got to go home, too.

But if the colonial settlers have no rights, then you've got
to argue that the Vietnamese people have no rights. Do you
know what the Vietnamese did in the nineteenth century?
There're only two villages left now in Vietnam of the
Champa kingdom. The Vietnamese were slaughtering
them in the nineteenth century; they were throwing out the
Cambodians. The Cambodians' national existence was
saved by the arrival of French imperialism. So why not give
back most of South Vietnam to the Cambodians, too? The
point is that almost every modern nation has been
consolidated on the basis of slaughtering and wiping out
and throwing out other communities and peoples. If you
want to argue in these terms, it's simply a form of
nationalist, liberal moralism, and leads straight into the
typical irredentist arguments about our "holy" land which
we've got to save or get back.

Now while I'm on the subject of the New Left and New
Left moralism, there's another argument, which is
presented as anti-economism. That is, the Protestants are
so bound up in their reactionary ideas that they can never
be part of a proletarian revolutionary mobilization. There
is a small British group, called the Revolutionary
Communist Group [RCG], which puts forward this
argument and prides itself on having a Marxist under-
standing. It recently split, largely because, while it claimed
to have a Marxist understanding, it never had any
programmatic conclusions. The RCG says:

"It is the height of naivete to expect the two sections of the
northern working class to unite on economic issues, when it is
precisely these that divide them. As the crisis begins to bite.

continued on next page

12

SPARTACIST

Northern Ireland...

(continued from page II)

the Protestant workers will pursue the traditional way out
the expulsion of Catholics from employment. Only later,
when the Unionist regime is visibly unable to preserve the
position of the Protestant workers, will the possibility exist
of breaking the Protestant workers from I.oyalism and
drawing them around the programme which emphasises
economic issues."

Now that ought to be absurd for Marxists.

I hat's full of back-handed support to Irish Catholic
nationalism, because what you're saying is that the workers
can never transcend their sectional interests; they'll always
be narrow and selfish and they'll always want to throw their
non-communal class brothers out of employment. So
rather than attempting to transcend that type of attitude
with a system of transitional demands, you come up with a
position which says: narrow trade-union consciousness
plus nationalism is revolutionary consciousness. And what
that leads to inevitably is a two-stage Stalinist theory of
revolution. Because in order for the workers to have
revolutionary consciousness, first of all, as a precondition,
they must fight for national liberation.

Protestant Communalism and the Union Jack

The Protestants have their origins as a settler
colonization. They've generally fought for the British
connection with one important historic exception: the 1 798
United Irishmen uprising, which was led by Protestant
Presbyterians -in particular clergymen and merchants—
and was defeated by mobilization of the peasantry by the
Catholic priests and the growth of the Orange Order
stimulated by the landed aristocracy and British interests.
That was effectively the opportunity for the establishment
of a united nation in Ireland and it failed. Since that time,
there have been these deep communal divisions.

1 want to make the point that Unionism and Loyalism —
i.e., Protestant communalism — should be understood as a
means and not an end. That is, the Protestants are acting in
what they perceive as their own interests; they're not just
agents of British imperialism. This can be graphically
shown by looking at quite a number of examples. I only
want to give one — Sir Edward Carson who was the first
prominent leader of the Protestants in this century. He was
actually a representative— to be more precise — of the old
landed aristocracy, and he differs significantly from later
people like Craigand Paisley in terms of his origins. But he,
as a leader of the Protestant interest in Ireland, was willing
to threaten British imperialism and to say that he would
seek German aid. So he saw the connection in a way that
wasn't just acting on British imperialism's behalf.

And you can see a series of other things happening,
which I've mentioned already — the 1912 opposition to
British plans for Irish home rule, the Ulster Protestant
workers' strike in 1974, the number of Protestant political
prisoners which all indicate that Protestant communal-
ism in Northern Ireland is not identical with support for
British imperialism.

So the Protestants have a separate identity. It's defined
largely negatively, as against the Irish Catholic nation.
Religion plays an important part; you've noticed I've been
using the term Irish Catholic nation to make the
distinction. It's not so much that everyone goes to different

churches, but the religious question provides an ideological
form for the dispute between the communities. And it's
deeply involved in the cultures and the nationalism of both
communities.

I .et me make one tjiing clear: the Protestant bigotry (and
its religious qualities) necessarily excedes the worst
excesses of Green nationalism, of Irish Catholic national-
ism. Take Rev. Ian Paisley this is from one of his
speeches:

"Watch the Jews. Israel is on the way back to favour. Watch
the papist Rome rising to a grand crescendo with the
C ommunists. The Reds are on the march; they are heading
lor an alliance against the return of Lord Jesus Christ."

And these are headings from his paper:
'The I.ove Affairs of the Vatican."
"Priestly Murders Exposed!"

"Children lorturcd. Monks Turned Out as Sadists!"
Now Paisley is not some sort of fringe crackpot religious
fanatic. He's a mass leader of the Protestants. He expresses
and is a manifestation of the attitudes amongst the
Protestants.

The Protestants have a self-image as being hardy and
self-reliant while the Catholics they see as being
dirty, indisciplined, lazy and breeding like rabbits. The
Orange Order, which is a sort of Masonic formation
amongst the Protestants, is the epitome of the Ulster
Protestant culture. It was created as an instrument of
counterrevolution around the time of the United Irish-
men's uprising and has been used ever since as such. Its
rituals, its exclusion of women, its marches represent a way
of life and a social focus for the Protestants.

No to Forced Reunification!

At the same time we look at the Republic and we find a
reactionary, clericalist regime. You don't need to go very
far to notice that. Take the best of the bourgeois papers in
Ireland and none of them are very good -the Irish Times.
You find that on every single issue, no matter how
insignificant, the thing that is absolutely necessary is the
opinion of a priest. The Protestants see themselves as
getting nothing from a unified bourgeois Ireland. And they
make a great deal about the clerical nature of the state.

There's a whole series of things that are not very
attractive about the southern Irish bourgeois state: the
prohibition on divorce and contraception, the role of the
Catholic church in education, its influence in the higher
circles of government. Its influence is not limited solely to
the most reactionary circles, but is found in the more
plebeian organizations as well. For example, in 1969
during the height of the civil rights movement, when there
were some layers of Protestants willing to support it at that
time, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association
refused to dissociate itself from the Irish Republic's
constitution, which contains provisions guaranteeing
rights to the Catholic church, and from Irish government
policies vis-a-vis the church and contraception.

Leaving aside the empirical facts of the nature of the
Irish Republic, apologists for unification argue that
presently and in general the Protestants have been treated
better in the South than the Irish Catholics in the North.
Now in the quantitative sense this is certainly true.
Presently, the Irish Catholic state is obviously much more
reasonable and liberal than the Protestants in Northern
Ireland.

AUTUMN 1977

13

However, there's a more basic point involved here. It's
not a matter of looking at the present relative reaction of
each nationalism, but seeing that religion is a core
component of the nationalism of both groups, and
understanding an elementary Marxist principle: that all
nationalism is reactionary. To suggest that the Irish
Catholic bourgeoisie will treat the Protestants well is to
argue that somehow this particular nationalism is
progressive, because it's going to be good to people who are
not of the Irish Catholic nation. There're no historical
examples of nationalist regimes doing that, so why should
the Irish be the exception?

The Protestant communalists are not any better, and in
the Northern state there is systematic discrimination in
housing, hiring and education. That's all well-known. The
majority of the sectarian murders that haVe taken place in
Northern Ireland in the recent period have been carribd out
by Protestant gangs. Let me give you one example of the
bigotry in this situation. A gang kicked in the door of a
house, lined up a family and shot them— kids and parents
alike. Before they shot the woman, one of them raped her.
This particular man was subsequently arrested by the
British army and received a long jail sentence. When he
arrived in jail, he was viciously beaten up by his
own comrades and almost killed. The reason he was beaten
up was not that he'd shot the Catholics, but because he'd
had sexual contact with a Catholic.

So there is obviously a series of urgent democratic
demands with regard to the Catholics in the Northern
Ireland statelet. In particular I want to mention housing
and employment, because just by arguing that it should be
more equitably shared, you say to the Protestant workers:
you should suffer some more. That's obviously not going to
solve the problem, so even in terms of immediate urgent
democratic tasks, these will have to be linked to demands
that have been classically associated with the Trotskyist
Transitional Program. For example, for a sliding scale of
hours and work-sharing on full pay.

There's a problem of distinct communities. We recognize
that there are distinctions, and we don't want to just ignore
them but seek to transcend them, and to offer some way out
of the vicious communal cycle. The one million Protestants
can be defined largely negatively, as against the Irish
Catholic nation, as being not part of the English and
Scottish nations any more, and not in a strict sense being a
nation either. But they do have a separate identity, and the
concerns of this community must be taken into account.

The definite resolution of what the Protestants are
exactly is most likely to occur at the time that the British
Army gets out, and will depend on the circumstances
accompanying that. That is, there could be the consolida-
tion of a real Protestant nation, based on a sectarian,
communalist bloodbath in the Irish Catholic community;
or they could be wiped out; or else they could, in the
context of a revolutionary working-class mobilization,
transcend these divisions.

We want to oppose the forcible reunification of the
island and reject the call for the "self-determination of the
Irish nation," demands which give preference to the claims
of one of the interpenetrated peoples. We call instead for an
Irish workers republic within a socialist federation of the
British Isles, which at this point leaves open exactly where
the Protestants will fall.

We counterpose the algebraic formulation of an Irish

workers republic to the common left-nationalist slogan
(e.g., of the IRA officials) of a "united socialist Ireland."
We do not insist that the Protestant majority in Northern
Ireland must be part of an all-Ireland workers state.
Furthermore, the slogan of a "united socialist Ireland" has
become a left cover for Green nationalism implying forced
reunification under bourgeois rule and a two-stage
revolution — first unity, then socialism.

For Anti-Sectarian Workers Militias!

There's another important plank in our program which 1
want to emphasize, and that is the demand for an anti-
sectarian workers militia to combat indiscriminate terror,
both Green and Orange. Now this has to be seen in its
proper context. There's a group in Britain called the
Militant group — a deeply opportunist organization inside
the Labour Party— which has a call for a trade-union
militia. Unfortunately, our slogan is sometimes confused
with this. Their slogan is coupled with the demand for
withdrawal of British troops, but they say that until there's
a trade-union militia the British Army should stay. And
they see this trade-union militia as growing out of some sort
of organic unity of the working class based on trade-union
economism.

If you take a look at the Armagh shootings last year,
where you had five Catholics shot in one night and, 1 think,
two nights later ten Protestant workers shot up in a mini-
bus, you can see a problem. Suppose the Protestant
workers had been an atmed self-defense group. What you
would have had was simply a sectarian shoot-out between
Catholics and Protestants. So obviously in each defense
squad you must have at least one member of both
communities.

But the question of an anti-sectarian workers militia is
also very much tied in with the rest of your program. It's
not just a matter of disliking the killings; what about the
British Army, what about indiscriminate terror? It has to
be linked to the revolutionary mobilization because
otherwise the trade-union militias would simply become
the armed adjunct of the peace movement, which doesn't
have a position on the key question of whether the British
Army should stay. Effectively the Militant group's demand
ends up supporting the status quo— that is. the British
Army stays, and capitalist law and order is maintained.

There are objections to the demand for an anti-sectarian
workers militia. One, is that it's not practical. I'think the
comrades are probably all familiar with this type of
reasoning— I believe it's one of the props of the Socialist
Workers Party's position on troops to Boston, that is.
labor/ black defense is not practical. Really it is a form of
reformist methodology used to justify capitulating.

The other argument is that it is wrong to equate the
terror of the oppressed and the oppressor. That's true, but
what it leads these people into doing is justifying any act by
an oppressed group. That is, as long as you say you are
fighting against imperialism, it doesn't matter what you do,
we give you a blank check. That means you have to justify
Grivas in Cyprus, who was a neo-fascist, not only when he
fought British imperialism, but when he went out and
slaughtered Turks. And you'd have to defend the Stern
gang, not only its actions when it fought British
imperialism, but when it slaughtered Palestinians. And, of
continued on next page

14

SPARTACIST

Northern Ireland...

(continued from page 13)

course, in Ireland this means taking the side of the IRA, not
only when they are fighting the British Army or the Royal
Ulster Constabulary, but also when they blow up
Protestant pubs.

The two sides are obviously different in Northern
Ireland: the Catholic minority is oppressed and you can't
ignore this. It's also true that the question of Irish self-
determination was not fully resolved by the establishment
of the Irish republic. We defend the IRA against the British
Army, but we need to distinguish between terrorism
directed against the imperialist oppressor and what is
purely indiscriminate, indefensible terrorism. We would
not want to defend the perpetrators of such barbarous acts.
An anti-sectarian workers militia would be interested in
stopping pub bombings which just slaughter workers, the
tube — subway — bombings and the Armagh shootings.

It's obvious that the analysis of terrorism is crucial to the
ability of that anti-sectarian workers militia to act in a way
that is supportable by Marxists. So that any anti-sectarian
workers militia is not only going to have to attract at least
one member from each community into each such
formation, but it must also have a strong component of
cadre from the revolutionary party.

Opportunities for Class Unity

I touched several times on the argument that it's not
practical to mobilise the Protestants. There's a difference
between on the one hand recognising the complexity of the
situation and the fact that mass consciousness has been
poisoned, and on the other hand a view of profound
historical pessimism which says that the working class
doesn't have the potentiality as a force for revolutionary
change.

If you look at the history of Ireland you can see a number
of contradictory phenomena. In 1907 there was a series of
strikes led by Jim Larkin which managed to keep
significant unity of Protestant and Catholic workers. In
1919 there was a Belfast engineers' (metal workers) strike.
The bourgeoisie managed to smash it, and in the sequel
12,000 Roman Catholics lost their jobs. But that wasn't all
that happened: 3,000 Protestant socialists and militants
lost their jobs, too. In 1933 there was massive unemploy-
ment, and for a brief period you had joint mass
unemployed marches in which it is reported the Green and
Orange flags flew together. This fleeting unity was
preceded by massive sectarian violence and followed by
massive sectarian upsurge, which destroyed the unity.

Things are not going to get better automatically. We
made the point in Workers Vanguard that in Cyprus there
was one period of 48 hours— at the time of the attempted
reactionary coup inspired by the Greek colonels' junta —
when the question of nationalism was flatly counterposed
to democratic issues, and there was a potentiality of uniting
the Turkish and Cypriot workers. It was only one short
period where the class struggle asserted itself and
subordinated these massive communal tensions, but it was
an opportunity.

The same is true in Ireland. In the absence of a
revolutionary party we might get some transitory unity on
pacifist or reformist grounds. The sequel to the Armagh

shootings is that there were joint marches of Protestant and
Catholic workers, but they were marching on a quite
unsupportable plank: they were demanding strengthening
of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, which we want to see
smashed!

In the absence of a revolutionary party the prospects are
bleak. But an organization which for many years may
remain isolated, generally hated and impotent can seize
such opportunities in the class struggle as I've outlined.
That means defending a Leninist perspective. It means
refusal to capitulate to British chauvinism, to Orange
loyalism and to Irish nationalism. If we have that, then we
can expect that when the opportunities do come, when the
class struggle reasserts itself in some form, such upsurges
will not be immediately droN^ned in communal bloodshed.
Nor will the workers have a transitory unity on the basis of
waving Green and Orange flags together— there will be an
opportunity for revolutionary cadre to see that the flags
they're waving are red flags. Such opportunities are a part
of the mobilisation towards the only progressive solution
for the bloody sectarian/communalist conflict in Northern
Ireland — proletarian revolution!

Supplemental Ftemarks by
Reuben Samuels

I just gave a forum on colonial-settler states and the
permanent revolution, which I would like to relate
to the Irish question. An interesting point about the
colonial-settler question in South Africa is that the "great
treks" of the Boers and, just a little later, by the Zulus in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries wiped out a great many
peoples whose economic livelihood was at a lower level of
development than either the Zulus or the Boers, such as the
Hottentots and Bushmen who were almost exterminated.

In fact, this has been the entire course of human progress
over the last ten thousand years. The history of class society
has been one of the subjugation or extermination of less
advanced peoples by a more advanced people — those
people who had the bigger hatchet, the longer ax, the ones
who developed gunpowder and so on. As Engels said,
human progress is indeed a cruel chariot that rides over
mountains of corpses.

There are a lot of petty-bourgeois vicarious nationalists,
very often at a great distance from the struggle they claim to
support, who have picked up the ideology of the "wretched
of the earth" from Bakunin to Fanon, and who would like
to reverse the chariot of human progress. They dream that
the less advanced societies will rise up against the more
advanced societies and create another mountain of corpses,
but at least the chariot will go downhill this time. j

Their politics are basically moralism, so for them what
makes the Protestants an oppressor people— or for that
matter the Israeli Hebrews, or the South African whites — is
their higher standard of living. In the case of the Protestant
workers in Northern Ireland, this is not much greater than
that of the Irish Catholics, and it's significantly less than the
standard of living of anyone in this room.

Let me point out that the average standard of living in
Northern Ireland is 25 percent below the standard of living
for ^11 of Great Britain, and I assure you that this is a very
low standard indeed for northern Europe. Furthermore, if

/

AUTUMN 1977

15

you compare Protestant to Catholic on the basis of income
differentials (which tends to exaggerate the difference), the
Protestants have a differential of about 1 5 percent over the
Catholics. Of course, there are percentagewise more poor
Catholics in Northern Ireland, but in absolute numbers
there are more poor Protestants than poor Catholics.

There is a book by Geoffrey Bell, published by the
International Socialists in Great Britain, which claims that
the Protestants are a labor aristocracy. He uses the
following reasoning: if you look at the labor aristocracy,
it's predominantly Protestant; therefore all Protestant
workers constitute a labor aristocracy, or are part of the
labor aristocracy. If you look at the labor aristocracy in the
United States, by comparison, it's predominantly white;
therefore supposedly all white workers are part of a labor
aristocracy, as the New Leftist Noel Ignatin told us some
years ago. This kind of logic, which I call Geoffrey Bell
logic, has superseded both Aristotelian and Hegelian logic.
It runs as follows: most or all donkeys are animals,
therefore all animals are donkeys.

These are the arguments of people who have despaired of
a proletarian solution, that is, a solution other than the
mounds upon mounds of corpses that the chariot of history
has gone up or come down in the past. This solution, which
has only been opened up in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, is counterposed to the way in which the national
question has been resolved historically, namely through
genocide, forced population transfers and subjugation of
the oppressed peoples.

And if you don't think the terms of oppression can be
reversed, just look at Cyprus. Two thousand years ago
Cyprus was colonized by the Greeks; five hundred years
ago it was colonized by the Turks, who became an
oppressor people under the Ottoman Empire. The British
imperialists cultivated both peoples at one time or another.
So who were the oppressor people after the British left? The
Greeks. And who are the oppressor people in Cyprus

today? The Turks. The terms of oppression can definitely
be reversed.

This is not the Leninist solution to the national question.
This is the Bakuninist/ Fanonist solution: to reverse the
terms of oppression, to call for a unified, necessarily
Catholic-dominated Ireland without a proletarian
revolution.

The 1973 Ulster general strike, a 14-day general strike
that totally shut down Northern Ireland, demonstrated
that the social power and the social weight of the
proletariat is there, even if in this particular case it was used
for reactionary ends. It was also an entirely anti-British
strike. The British had set up the Council of Ireland, which
was a scheme for a peaceful, if forcible (through economic
pressure) reunifying of Ireland and dumping Northern
Ireland, which has become a liability for British
imperialism.

The strike was entirely reactionary, but that was a
demonstration of real social power, social power that can
be welded to the chariot of human progress, which in this
epoch can only be drawn by the proletariat as an
international class. And those people who have posed the
proletarian solution as opposed to the nationalist solution
have gotten a hearing in spite of the communal hatreds. We
stand in their tradition, in the tradition of Jim Larkin and
the Palestinan Trotskyists.

Supplemental Remarks by
James Robertson

Life is complicated, comrades. In the past generation, in
the attempt to defend the jUst struggles of
oppressed peoples, there's been a tendency to lose the
context in which, for proletarian revolutionary Marxists,
that struggle must be undertaken. What we are seeking to
do is to defend the core of revolutionary Marxism, the
continued on next page

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16

SPARTACIST

Victim of attacit by British troops.

G. Peress/Magnum

Theses on
Ireland

The theses on Ireland printed on the facing page were
adopted by the International Executive Committee of
the iSt on 5 August 1977. They are a product of the
political work which the iSt has devoted to dealing
with the complexities of the national question in cases
involving geographically interpenetrated peoples. As
such, the theses codify the significant extensions and
refinements which the iSt has made in its programmat-
ic approach to the Irish question over the last several
years.

These theses were initiated on the basis of discus-
sions on the Irish question within the London Sparta-
cist Group during the fall of 1976. Reprinted as a
supplementary contribution on the Irish question is
the presentation, "Workers Must Crush Sectarian
Terror!", which first appeared in Workers Vanguard
No. 156, 6 Mav 1977.

Northern Ireland...

(continued from page 15)

proletarian solution, against those who would simply
embrace the "good" nation against the "bad" nation.

I believe that there's very little that can be added to
Comrade David's talk in the particular framework of
Ireland. I'd like to underline one thing: he spoke -of the
metal workers' strike in 1919. in which 12,000 Catholics
and 3.000 socialist, class-struggle-oriented Protestants
were fired, driven out of the industry. Ireland is a very small
country, so that is probably more than half oi the metal
workers. Driven out!

What then do you have? We thought we had a bad purge
in the late 1940's in the United States where 10,000
communistic elements were driven out. But that's 1/ lOOth
of one percent, not over 50 percent. So those who think that
the Irish are simply locked into endless sectarian killing
should examine the historical record. The metal workers
could have been and were trying to be the leadership of the
proletariat on the island, but over 50 percent of them were
socially annihilated. That's a defeat in a struggle, not the
organic chauvinism of the priest-ridden and the arrogant!

That's where the function of the revolutionary party
comes in. Every generation there recurs the opportunity
and the loopholes where an international Leninist
formation that is alert can intervene. You must not take
what is at present as the inevitable product of history which
cannot be changed, ever. It's necessary to fight, not to be
passive.

And in the case of Ireland, it's particularly easy. On the
island of Cyprus, a Greek is a Greek and a Turk is a Turk.
How many of you have had the same experience that I have
had. of working with young militants, either Ulstermen or

from the Republic of Ireland? As soon as they're broken
from the nationalist ideologies, and you encounter them
and work with them as comrades outside that poor island,
they are simply components of the English-speaking
nation. That's the truth. It is only when locked into this
poverty and oppression that they're thrown at each others'
throats. They may become separate nations, in the defeat of
the proletarian goal. But not yet

Last point: when 1 talked here last time, some young
woman, who I'm sure was entirely well-meaning, said,
"Does any people who oppresses others have a right to
exist?" That's the only thing that 1 took away from the
discussion that I'd been brooding about. And then I
thought, if one wants to be idiosyncratic and make trouble,
what's the most chauvinist people on earth, who absolutely
have the right to exist? I think it's probably the Chinese. In
2,000 years they developed no other term for foreigners
except, "the barbarians." Do you understand the concep-
tion behind that? But they have the right to exist. They were
just a very powerful people, used to suppressing those on
their borders and never running into anybody from a
culturally higher standpoint, even if they were occasionally
conquered by "barbarians." It's the nature of the world in
the framework of a class-divided society.

I have two observations to end with. For many
minorities that are powerful— the young woman put it the
wrong way around— it is seen as necessary to oppress in
order to exist. That's one of the lessons of life that we have
to shatter, but it does give some insight into the question.
Finally, what should be very obvious, something that
precedes Marxism but was encompassed within it: we do
not believe that any baby born into an ethnic, religious or
national group thereby deserves or merits a death sentence.
That's the answer to that young woman. ■

AUTUMN 1977

17

1. The current situation and social configuration in
Ireland is the result of centuries of brutal British imperialist
domination. It contains features characteristically asso-
ciated with the former multi-national states of Eastern
Europe, as well as with both the colonial settler states
which established their own political economy by exclud-
ing or destroying native populations, and colonies in which
the native population is exploited and oppressed by a
relatively thin colonial hierarchy.

In the absence of any significant section of the Irish
working class historically freed from national/communal
insecurity, the result is a seemingly intractable situation in
which prospects for the development of a genuine class-
struggle axis and for an end to the interminable cycle of
imperialist exploitation/repression and inter-communal
violence appear remote. The strong possibility remains that
a just, democratic, socialist solution to the situation in
Ireland will only come under the impact of proletarian
revolution elsewhere and concretely may be carried on the
bayonets of a Red Army against opposition of a significant
section of either or both of the island's communities.

Nevertheless, no matter to what extent a bleak
immediate prognosis is justified, the conflict in Ireland
presents a crucial test of the capacity of a revolutionary
internationalist tendency to provide a clear analysis and
program and to confront the national question in the
imperialist epoch. For revolutionists, who refuse to deal in
the simplicities (ultimately genocidal) of the nationalists,
the situation in Ireland can appear to be exceedingly
complex and intractable. The "Irish question" provides a
strong confirmation of the unique revolutionary potency
and relevance of the international Spartacist tendency's
understanding of Leninism, particularly in relation to
geographically interpenetrated peoples.

2. An essential element of our program is the demand
for the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of the British
army. British imperialism has brought centuries of
exploitation, oppression and bloodshed to the island. No
good, can come of the British presence; the existing tie
between Northern Ireland and the British state can only be
oppressive to the Irish Catholic population, an obstacle to
a proletarian class mobilisation and solution. We place no
preconditions on this demand for the immediate with-
drawal of all British military forces or lessen its categorical
quality by suggesting "steps" toward its fulfillment (such as
simply demanding that the army should withdraw to its
barracks or from working-class districts).

At the same time we do not regard the demand as
synonymous with or as a concrete application of either the
call for Irish self-determination (that is, a unitary state of
the whole island) or for an independent Ulster — two
solutions which within the framework of capitalism would
be anti-democratic, in the first case toward the Protestants
and in the second toward the Irish Catholics. Nor is the
demand for the withdrawal of British troops sufficient in
itself, as though it has some automatic, inherent revolu-
tionary content or outcome. As the eminent British
bourgeois historian A.J. P. Taylor observed in an
interview:

"1 don't know what the term bloodbath means, if it means
people will be killed, they are being killed all the time. The
alternative is not between an entirely peaceful Northern
Ireland in which nobody's being killed and a Northern
Ireland in which a lot of people will be killed. If the British

withdraw some sort of settlement would be arrived at. You
can't tell what it is because the forces in play can't be judged
until they can operate

". . .the presence of the British Army in Ireland prolongs the

period of conflict and uncertainty

"This [possibility of a united Ireland] is a matter of relative
strength. Owing to the history of the last thirty years or
perhaps longer, owing to history since 1885, when Randolph
Churchill —Winston's father -first raised the cry of 'Ulster
will fight and Ulster will be right' in the past ninety years
the Protestants of Northern Ireland have been taught to
think of themselves as a separate body, almost separate
nationality within Ireland, and have established now a long-
term domination of Northern Ireland, partly because of their
superior economic strength, partly because of the backing
they have received from the British Government, and partly
because they are, or up to now have been, the more
determined. For them, Protestant domination is the answer
to the situation in Northern Ireland."
— Troops Out. No. 2

As historically demonstrated by examples such as India,
Libya, Cyprus and Palestine, the withdrawal of British
imperialism, while a necessary objective of the communist
vanguard, in itselfdoes not automatically ensure an advance
in a revolutionary direction. Thus, the demand for the
immediate withdrawal of the British army from Northern
Ireland must be linked to and constitute a part of a whole
revolutionary program.

3. As Leninists we are opposed to all forms of national
oppression and privilege and stand for the equality of
nations. Writing in 1 9 1 3 Lenin succinctly set forth as follows
the fundamental pririciples underlying the revolutionary
social-democratic position on the national question:

"As democrats, we are irreconcilably hostile to any, however
slight, oppression of any nationality and to any privileges for
any nationality. As democrats, we demand the right of
nations to self-determination in the political sense of that
term... i.e., the right to secede. We demand unconditional
protection of the rights of every national minority. We
demand broad self-government and autonomy for regions,
which must be demarcated, among other terms of reference,
in respect of nationality too."

—"Draft Programme of the 4th Congress of Social
Democrats of the Latvian Area." Collected Works.
Vol. 19

Thus, the right to self-determination means simply the
right to establish a separate state, the right to secede. We
reject the notion that it means "freedom from all outside
interference and control" or entails economic independ-
ence. In the general sense the right to self-determination is
unconditional, independent of the state that emerges or its
leadership.

However, for Leninists this right is not an absolute
demand, a categorical imperative, to be implemented at all
times and everywhere there is a nation. It is only one of a
range of bourgeois-democratic demands; it is a part,
subordinate to the whole, of the overall programmatic
system. When the particular demand for national self-
determination contradicts more crucial demands or the
general needs of the class struggle, we oppo.se its exercise.
As Lenin notes:

"The several demands of democracy, including self-
determination, are not an absolute, but only a small part of
the general-democratic (now: general-socialist) u orW move-
ment. In individual concrete cases, the part may contradict
the whole; if so, it must be rejected." [emphasis in original]
— "The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed
Up." Collected Works. Vol. 22

continued on next page

18

SPARTACIST

Theses on Ireland...

(continued from page 17)

In particular, in the case of interpenetrated peoples
sharing a common territory, we oppose the exercise of self-
determination by one nation where this flatly conflicts with
the same right for another nation. In this situation the same
general considerations apply, namely our opposition to all
forms of national oppression and privilege, but in such
circumstances the exercise of self-determination by one or
the other people in the form of the establishment of their
own bourgeois state can only be brought about by the
denial of that right to the other. Under capitalism this
would simply be a formula for reversing the terms of
oppression, for forcible population transfers and expul-
sions and ultimately genocide. It is a "solution" repeatedly
demonstrated in history, for example in the cases of India/
Pakistan, Israel/ Palestine and Cyprus.

In general, our support for the right to self-
determination is negative: intransigent opposition to every
manifestation of national oppression as a means toward
the unity of the working class, not as the fulfillment of the
"manifest destiny" or "heritage" of a nation, nor as support
for "progressive" nations or nationalism. We support the
right of self-determination and national liberation
struggles in order to remove the national question from the
historic agenda, not to create another such question.
Within the framework of capitalism there can be no purely
democratic solution (for example through universal

suffrage) to the national question in cases of interpenetrat-
ed peoples.

The same general considerations apply not only to "fully
formed" nations, but also to nationalities and peoples which
may still be something less than fully consolidated nations,
for example the Eritreans in their struggle against Amharic
domination or the Biafrans at the time of the Nigerian civil
war. Indeed, not infrequently the historical formation of
nations is tested and completed in the process of struggles for
self-determination. Our opposition to the exercise of self-
determination by an interpenetrated people would also
apply where one or more of the groupings, though not a
historically compacted nation, has sufficient relative size
iind cultural level that the exercise of self-determination
could only mean a new form or reversal of the terms of
oppression.

4. Concretely, in Ireland the question of Irish national
self-determination was not fully resolved by the establish-
ment of the Republic of Eire. But to demand "Irish self-
determination" today represents a denial of the Leninist
position on the national question. It is incumbent on
revolutionists to face up to exactly what the call for "self-
determination of the Irish people as a whole" means.

Obviously the call is not one for the simultaneous self-
determination of both communities, an impossibility fbr
interpenetrated peoples under capitalism. In another sense
the demand is about as meaningful as calling for "self-
determination for the Lebanese people as a whole" in the
middle of last year's communal bloodletting. In the case of

British troops round up "suspected IRA members" in Northern Ireland.

Gamma

AUTUMN 1977

19

Ireland such a demand utterly fails to come to terms with
the question of the Protestant community of Ulster,
comprising 60 percent of the statelet's and 25 percent of the
whole island's population. Such a demand is a call for the
formation of a unitary state of the whole island, including
the forcible unification of the whole island by the Irish
bourgeois state irrespective of the wishes of the Protestant
community. It is a call for the Irish Catholics to self-
determine at the expense of the Protestants. It is a call for
the simple reversal of the terms of oppression, an implicit
call for inter-communal slaughter, forced population
transfers and ultimately genocide as the way forward to the
Irish revolution.

5. The present six-county enclave in Northern Ireland is
a "sectarian. Orange statelet," the product of an imperialist
partition. Prior to the partition revolutionaries would have
opposed partition, striving to cement revolutionary unity
in the struggle for independence from British imperialism.
However, with the partition, the accompanying communal
violence and demographic shifts, and the establishment of
a bourgeois republic in the south it was necessary
to oppose the forcible reunification of the six counties with
the rest of Ireland. At the same time the present statelet
guarantees the political and economic privileges of the
Protestants. We oppose the Orange state and the demand
for an independent Ulster as forms of determination for the
Protestants which necessarily maintain the oppression of
the Irish Catholic population of Ulster, an extension of the
Irish Catholic nation. Since they are the local bodies of the
British repressive state apparatus and the training ground
for the present Protestant paramilitary groups and a future
reactionary Protestant army, we demand: Smash the Royal
Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and the Ulster Defence
Regiment (UDR).

6. There is a series of urgent democratic demands that
apply to the situation of the oppressed Irish Catholics in
Northern Ireland. We demand full democratic rights for
the Catholic minority and an end to discrimination in
housing and hiring. But such demands must be linked to
class demands which transcend the bounds of bourgeois
democracy. Without the demand for a sliding scale of
wages and hours, for example, the call to end discrimina-
tion will simply imply leveling in an already economically
depressed situation. The relevant partial, negative, demo-
cratic and economic demands must be integrated into the
revolutionary transitional program which transcends the
capitalist framework of economism and democratic
reformism.

7. Historically the Protestants of Ulster were an
extension of the Scottish and English nations. The 1798
United Irishman uprising was led by the Protestant middle
class and reflected the impact of the French and American
bourgeois revolutions on the nascent capitalist class
(overwhelmingly Protestant) in Ireland. This insurrection
against British imperialism, which was defeated in part by
the development of the reactionary sectarian Orange Order
and the mobilisation of the peasantry by Catholic priests,
was the opportunity for the establishment of a modern
nation of the whole island. Since that time, though the most
modern capitalist sectors remained Protestant for a long
period, the Protestants have acted for the most part as loyal
and fervent defenders of the union with British imperial-
ism. The bigotry and discrimination among the Protestants

toward the Irish Catholic nation necessarily exceeds the
worst excesses of Irish Green nationalism, and most of the
sectarian murders in the current period have been carried
out by Protestant paramilitary groups.

Though not yet a nation, the Protestants are certainly
not a part of the Irish nation and are distinct from the
Scottish and English nations. Presently their separate
existence is defined in large part as against the Irish
Catholic nation and at the ideological level is expressed in
religious terms. With their own social and cultural fabric
(epitomised in the Orange Order) and history of opposition
to the Irish nationalist cause, they have therefore acted as
the "loyalist" allies of British imperialism. At the same
time, in this century the allegiance has been more a means
than an end, demonstrated, for example, by the willingness
of Sir Edmund Carson to seek German aid if British
imperialism would not fulfill the Ulster Protestants'
demands and by the 1974 Ulster Workers Strike.

In all likelihood, a definite resolution of the exact
character of the Ulster Protestant community will be
reached with the withdrawal of the British army and will
depend on the circumstances surrounding this. The
particular conditions will pose point-blank their future and
the "solution" to the Irish question. The solution posed by
A.J. P. Taylor is but one possibility:

"The question is whether the Irish nationalist majority is
strong enough to expel the Protestants. If they are. that is'the
best way out."

— quoted in the Guardian [London], 13 April 1976

At the same time the social organisation, weaponry,
military expertise and alliances of the Protestants, make a
"Zionist" solution entirely conceivable. On the other hand,
if the withdrawal of the British army was in the context of
massive class mobilisations, opportunities would un-
doubtedly arise for a class determination of the question.

8. Attempts to ignore or deny the separate identity and
interests of the Ulster Protestants through the familiar
liberal plea that British or other socialists cannot "tell the
Irish how to wage their struggle" or the argument that only
oppressed nations have a right to self-determination can be
rejected easily on general theoretical grounds. The
Protestants are neither a colonial administration (as were
the British in India) nor a closed colour caste (as are the
whites in South Africa). Arguments that the Protestants
have no legitimate claim because they were originally
settlers and the present statelet is an artificial imperialist
creation are based ultimately on notions of nationalist
irredentism and "historical justice." Although sometimes
expressed as the demand that the Protestants go "home,"
such arguments are in the last analysis genocidal. Also
inadequate is the explanation of the Protestants as simply a
backward sector of the Irish nation, whose loyalism/Or-
angeism is purely an imperialist ideology given a certain
nationalist tinge in'order to attract a mass base.

9. Protestant communalism does have a material basis
in the marginal privileges enjoyed by the Protestant
workers. The most explicit attempt to confront and
discount the Protestant community's separate identity in
"Marxist" terms is the description of the Protestant
working class as a "labor aristocracy." This explanation is
similar to the New Left theories about the American white
working class and involves an attempt to broaden the term
so as to destroy its original meaning, while failing to

continued on next page

20

SPARTACIST

Theses on Ireland...

(continued from page 19)

recognise that the Protestant community extends through
all classes and strata of society. Even to claim that the entire
Protestant working class of Northern Ireland is a labour
aristocracy is a gross distortion of the term. The Northern
Ireland working class as a whole has some of the worst
wages, unemployment and housing in the British Isles.
Moreover, wage differentials between Protestant and
Catholic workers are not so marked that the two
communities have significantly different living standards.

10. From the point of view of the general interests of
British imperialism the border between Ulster and the
Republic is now anachronistic:

"Uriited Kingdom soldiers and officials and money are
heavily deployed in Northern Ireland because Westminster
has clear obligations there. English Governments of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries planted the garrison-
colonists whose descendents' presence has been the principal
source of Ireland's twentieth century distress; and London is
the seat of such authority as the Province knows. To
withdraw that authority now would intensify the problem of
public order without in the least advancing a settlement of
the central political question. The search for an acceptable
local administration would simply continue in worsened
circumstances. Britain's strategic interest in Northern
Ireland is dead, and its economic interest is all on the side of
withdrawal; but moral as well as practical considerations
demand that British resources should remain engaged until
both the political and the public order problems are at least
within sight of resolution."

O/j^frver [London], 1 February 1976

While historically British imperialism has used the
sectarian divisions, played the "Ulster card" to its own
advantage, it is not now committed to the preservation of
the Orange statelet and would prefer a settlement which
would remove its direct political responsibility on the
island. With the decline of Ulster industry and the growth
of investment opportunities in the south, the border is an
obstacle to its overall intentions. But at the same time as it
adopts various schemes to this end British imperialism is
constrained to maintain capitalist law and order and
prevent a complete breakdown in the social order. The
increase in independence talk by Ulster Protestants, the
Ulster Workers Strike of 1974 and the significant number
of Protestants imprisoned for political offences do not
reflect mere "tactical" differences between the imperialists
and their subordinates, but rather a divergence of interests
between genuinely distinct forces.

11. We reject the argument that Protestant workers are
so reactionary that only force will convince them and that
the precondition for winning them is the destruction of the
Orange statelet. The understanding that the current
partition is inherently oppressive is perverted into a
conception of a "two-stage" revolution in which the
socialist tasks can only follow the completion of Irish
national unity on the whole island. Sometimes linked to
this is the claim that it is "naive" to expect the Protestant
and Catholic workers to unite on "economic" issues, since
it is these that divide them. By analogy, no working class
could ever transcend its sectional interests. Economism is
the political expression of the failure of the working class in
the absence of a revolutionary leadership to reject
bourgeois ideology and place its revolutionary class
interests above particular, sectional or apparent needs or

desires. The above argument is based on the central
premise of economism— that the working class cannot
transcend its immediate sectional interests and identify
with all oppressed and the future of humanity. Such "anti-
economism" is in fact a denial of the pertinence of the
Transitional Programme in the service of the nationalism of
the oppressed.

12. The Protestants feel legitimately threatened by the
proposal for a united (bourgeois) Ireland, that is, their
forcible absorption into an enlarged version of the
reactionary clericalist state of Eire. The communalism/ na-
tionalism of the Protestants has a defensive character and is
not the chauvinism of a great power. A united bourgeois
Ireland would not provide a democratic solution for their
claims and we must therefore reject such a solution. Such a
state would necessarily be sectarian, and the Protestants
will not voluntarily enter such a union.

The difficulties of such a solution are indicated in the
earlier experience of the Bolsheviks. At the Second
Congress of the Communist International in 1920 the
Ukrainian delegate Merejin observed in an amendment to
the "Theses on the National and Colonial Questions":
"The attempt made to settle the relationship between the
nations of the majority and the minority nationalities in
territories of mixed population (Ukraine, Poland, White
Russia), has shown that the transfer of the power of
government from the hands of the big capitalists to the
groups of petty bourgeoisie constituting the democratic
republics not only does not diminish but, on the contrary,
aggravates the friction among the nationalities. The
democratic republics oppose themselves to the proletariat
and attempt to convert the class war into a national one.
They become rapidly impregnated with nationalistic exclu-
siveness, and easily adapt themselves to the practices of the
previous dominating nations, which fermented discord
among the nationalities, and organised pogroms, with the
assistance of the government apparatus, to combat the
dictatorship of the proletariat "

The present Irish bourgeois republic is a clerical reaction-
ary state in which the Roman Catholic Church enjoys
considerable real and latent powers. An essential aspect of
this is not the current level of religious persecution or
discrimination (though the current repressive measures
directed mostly against the I R A are an indication of the Irish
bourgeoisie's intentions), but the relationship of Roman
Catholicism to Irish nationalism, especially as it helps to
define the divisions between the two communities.

Leninism and nationalism are fundamentally counter-
posed political viewpoints. Thus, while revolutionists
struggle against all forms of national oppression, they are
also opposed to all forms of nationalist ideology. It is a
revision of Leninism to claim that the "nationalism of the
oppressed" is progressive and can be supported by
communist internationalists. In one of his major works on
the national question Lenin stressed:

"Marxism cannot be reconciled with nationalism, be it even

of the 'most just,' 'purest,' most refined and civilised brand.

In place of all forms of nationalism Marxism advances

internationalism "

"Critical Remarks on the National Question,"
Collected Works, Vol. 20

To attempt to dismiss the above-mentioned features of
Irish nationalism and the Irish Republic, to suggest that
somehow these matters are not important, is to imply that
Irish nationalism and capitalism are in some way
"progressive" and (unlike all other nationalists and
capitalists) will not promote racial, sexual and communal

AUTUMN 1977

21

divisions in the working class, in particular will not
discriminate and persecute non-members of their national
grouping.

13. Ireland, like other situations of interpenetrated
peoples as in the Middle East and Cyprus, is a striking
confirmation of the Trotskyist theory of permanent
revolution. The inevitable conclusion is that while
revolutionists must oppose all aspects of national oppres-
sion, they must also recognise that the conflicting claims of
interpenetrated peoples can only be equitably resolved in
the framework of a workers state. We struggle for an Irish
workers republic as part of a socialist federation of the
British Isles. While the establishment of a united workers
state of the whole island may be preferable, the above
demand is algebraic, leaving open the question of where the
Protestants fall. This recognises that the nature of the
Protestant community has not yet been determined in
history. As such, it is counterposed to calls for a "united
workers republic" or for a "united socialist Ireland" (where
this demand is not simply an expression for left/nationalist
or Stalinist two-stage theories). Placing the demand in the
context of a socialist federation has the additional
advantage of highlighting the essential relationship af the
proletarian revolution in the whole area and the virtual
impossibility of the resolution of the Irish question on a

G. Peress/Magnum

IRA checkpoint in the Bogside in Londonderry, 1972.

working-class basis outside this framework. This, and the
strong representation of Irish workers in the working class
in Britain, points to the demand for a British Isles-wide
trade-union federation as a method of promoting joint
struggle and cutting across the divisions in the working
class in Ireland.

14. Particular emphasis must be placed on the demand
for programmatically based anti-sectarian workers militias
to combat Orange and Green terror and imperialist
rampage. The British bourgeois press and the local
imperialists' bloodstained henchmen in the British Labour
Party responded hysterically to a composite motion at the
1976 BLP Conference demanding the withdrawal of British
troops and the formation of a trade-union based militia,
despite the fact that the motion was the inadvertent result
of right-wing culling of motions expressing ersatz Irish
nationalist positions and a mealy-mouthed resolution from
the Militant grouping. Our demand is not the same as that
of the deeply opportunist and BLP-entrist Militant group,
which links its call for trade-union militias to the call for
troop withdrawal in a way that makes the existence of
trade-union militias a precondition for troop withdrawal
and which sees the militias as growing organically out of
economist struggles. In Ulster the problem is not that the
workers are not armed. Such militias will need a broad and
strong programmatic basis if they are not to be derailed or
coopted. They cannot develop just out of trade unionism
but fundamentally require the existence of a strong and
authoritative revolutionary cadre. Each militia unit would
need at least one member of each community and the
presence and strong influence of trained revolutionary
cadre. Consequently, the demand for an anti-sectarian
workers militia is closely linked to the growth of a Leninist
party based on a developed revolutionary program.
Without being based on the demand for the immediate
withdrawal of the British army and without our analysis of
terrorism, for example, such workers militias would simply
be the armed adjunct of the women's peace movement.

15. In military conflicts between Irish nationalist or-
ganisations and the British army/state authorities we
defend the actions of the former since this is still a struggle
of an oppressed nationality against imperialism, even
though their struggle may be associated with a program
which, if accomplished, would violate the democratic
rights of the Protestants. This stance implies nothing about
the program of these groups, which can range from those
similar to the Zionist Stern Gang and Grivas' EOKA to
more radical "socialist" nationalists.

Outside this military struggle with British imperialism
and its direct agents, in the conflict between the Irish
Catholic and Protestant communities and their respective
organisations, the national/communal aspect transcends
any formal left/right differences. Such violence is frequent-
ly directed against symbols of non-sectarianism (for
example, pubs where both Catholic and Protestant
workers socialise) and is an obstacle to any form of
integrated class struggle. Terrorist acts directed against the
Protestant community by organisations of the oppressed
Irish Catholic community are in no way a blow against
imperialism, not justifiable as the "violence of the
oppressed" and are no more "progressive" or defensible
than similar acts by Protestant paramilitary groups. Thus,
continued on next page

22

SPARTACIST

Theses on Ireland...

(continued from page 21 )

while attacks on British army posts or the bombing of
Aldershot miHtary barracks are politically defensible acts,
the pub bombings (both in Catholic and Protestant
neighbourhoods), the London underground bombings, the
South Armagh shootings and other such acts of indiscrimi-
nate terrorism are completely indefensible, in no way
representing a blow against imperialism. Such acts, based
as they are on nationalist and genocidal premises, can only
deepen communal divisions and erect barriers to working-
class unity.

In such circumstances we recognise the right of both
communities to self-defence. Simply because an organisa-
tion claims to be fighting on behalf of the oppressed and
against imperialism does not make all its acts defensible. If
this were so, then revolutionists would be compelled to
defend the actions of both the EOKA in Cyprus and the
Zionist Stern Gang in Palestine (organisations to whom the
Provisional IRA are akin), not only when they attacked
British imperialism but respectively in their attacks on the
Turkish community and the Palestinians (at Deir Yassin,
for example). Only with this understanding of terrorism
can the workers militias in Northern Ireland be armed
against capitulating to a blanket approval of the terrorism
of the oppressed or becoming a mask for the machinations
of imperialism.

16. In the history of the Irish labour movement there
have been examples of significant workers' solidarity which
have temporarily cut across the sectarian divisions.
Invariably, as in the case of the 1919 Belfast engineers'
strike and the mass unemployment marches in the 1930's,

they have been countered with massive sectarian mobilisa-
tions intended to wipe out the fragile proletarian unity. In
the absence of a revolutionary party, there can arise
examples of transitory unity, albeit on pacifist or reformist
grounds. A sequel to the South Armagh shootings was
joint marches of Protestant and Catholic workers; but they
marched to demand the strengthening of the RUC, which
must be smashed.

Even such examples indicate the potentiality for workers
unity. The instances of class solidarity are not proof of a
deep-seated strain of class unity or that the situation is not
poisoned by sectarian hatreds, but indicate that the
opportunity can arise for a revolutionary organisation,
though perhaps hitherto isolated, weak and small, to
intervene, altering the course of the conflict toward a class
determination and pfoletarian revolution.

For the Immediate and Unconditional Withdrawal of
the British Army!

Smash the R UC and the UDR!

Down with the Prevention of Terrorism Act and All
Other Special Powers Acts in Britain and Ireland!

Full Democratic Rights for the Catholic Minority in
Northern Ireland!

No Discrimination in Hiring and Housing! For a Sliding
Scale of Wages and Hours!

For a Programmatically Based Anti-Sectarian Workers
Militia To Combat Orange and Green Terror and
Imperialist Rampage!

For a British Isles- Wide Trade- Union Federation!

Forward to the Irish Section of the Reborn Fourth
International!

No Forcible Reunification! For An Irish Workers
Republic Within A Socialist Federation of the British
Isles!

AUTUMN 1977

23

On Bourgeois Class
Consciousness

by Joseph Seymour

"Each new class which puts itself in the
place of the one ruling before it, is
compelled, merely in order to carry
through its aim, to represent its interest as
the common interest of all members of
society — It will give its ideas the form of
universality, and present them as the only
rational, universally valid ones."

— Karl Marx, The German Ideology

The relationship between the institutional
structure of capitalism and the conscious policies of
the bourgeoisie remains something of a gray area in
Marxist theory. At one pole is the purely structural
approach of social-democratic revisionism, inwhich
the institutions of capitalism are not associated with
nor considered to be defended by definite groups of
people. This outlook is central to the social-
democratic theory of the state. At the other pole is the
conspiracy theory of history, in which a totally self-
conscious ruling class manipulates society to remain
in power.

Historically, the conspiracy approach has been
generally associated with "leftism." However, this is
not logically necessary. A purely manipulationist
view of capitalism can lead to a completely elastic
conception of reformist possibilities, particularly the
degree to which unlimited economic concessions can
be granted, thus ignoring the law of value. Thus
either approach can be compatible with reformist
conclusions — either the view that there are only the
automatic workings of the system without a definite
class enemy, or the view that the bourgeoisie is so
conscious that it can forestall any development of a
revolutionary situation, making reformism the only
feasible approach.

A purely structural approach is compatible with
those forms of "leftism" which consist solely in
propagandizing that socialism is a superior form of
social organization (e.g. DeLeonism). It is, however,
incompatible with Leninism. The Leninist theory of
the state holds that the ruling class is a definite group
of people who have to be replaced in the administra-
tion of society by another definite group of people,
the core of which is the proletarian vanguard party.
Thus the Leninist party is not only an instrument for
organizing the revolutionary class for the seizure of

power, but is also the nucleus of the administration of
a workers state.

"The Best of All Possible Worlds"

Bourgeois class "consciousness" is not Marxist
class analysis in reverse. It is necessarily a false
consciousness imposed on the bourgeoisie by its need
to "represent its interest as the common interest of all
members of society" and to "give its ideas the form of
universality." Therefore, bourgeois ideology always
presents the existing society as the "best of all possi-
ble worlds." This is not to say that bourgeois ideology
always presents society in an optimistic light. But
where a pessimistic outlook is presented, human
suffering is attributed to human nature (e.g.
Hobbes), scarce natural resources (e.g. Malthus) or
god.

Insofar as it does not borrow from Marxism,
bourgeois ideology is simply a hypostatization of
bourgeois society. The central principle of bourgeois
social theory, from Comte through Weber to Talcott
Parsons, is the universality and necessity of social
stratification. The idea of an egalitarian society
based on the enormous raising of the technical and
cultural level of mankind is completely foreign to
bourgeois sociology. Bourgeois economics, by defi-
nition, deals with a society characterized by scarcity
in the face of unequal distribution of skills and

resources. .

continued on next page

24 SPARTACIST

Even where bourgeois ideology appropriates
some Marxist concepts, it retains its "best of all
possible worlds" aspect. This is most clearly ex-
pressed in social-democratic revisionism, represent-
ed by George Lichtheim. Post World War II revision-
ism of the Kautskyan school maintains that
capitalism has changed to meet the programmatic
goals which nineteenth century Marxism associated
only with a socialist regime. Thus, it is claimed that
universal suffrage in a parliamentary system has
effectively transferred political powertothe working
class, or that technocratic capitalist planning means
production for use and not for profit.

Reactionary Marxists?

The question of bourgeois class consciousness
bears a certain relation to the old Austro-Marxist
concept of a Marxist who is notasocialist — one who
recognizes the historical inevitability of socialism
but does not support it, or possibly even opposes it.
However, the Marxist analysis of class society leads
directly to an understanding of socialism as a just,
super-abundant society capable of producinghappi-
er human beings. To recognize this and still oppose
socialism is to. be completely cynical. As Lukacs
correctly pointed out, the Austro-Marxist dichoto-
my between grasping a Marxist class analysis and
opting for a socialist society was a pseudo-problem
created by divorcing thought from its necessary
social consequences — an exercise in rational ideal-
ism. It isdoubtful if evenasingle bourgeois politician
could be totally cynical yet still effective. It is clearly
impossible for the entire ruling class to be cynical—
i.e., to despair of the social desirability or even the
historical possibility of its remaining in power.

It is significant that bourgeois politics approaches
open cynicism only in extreme degeneration —
fascism. And even here pure ruling-class power is
disguised with nationalist ideology of the most
reactionary sort. It is also significant that fascism
produced (as much by its ideology as by its actions) a
profound moral revulsion on the part of the Europe-
an working class which was an important element in
the revolutionary situation which developed in the
wake of World War II. The deep popularity and
revolutionary aspect of anti-fascist sentiment threw
the European bourgeoisie back to liberal reformist
ideology and parliamentary politics.

The falsity of the notion that the ruling class are
Marxists who are on the other side of the barricades
is demonstrated by ideologues trained in the manipu-
lation of Marxist concepts who go over to the camp
of reaction, such as Robert Michels and James
Burnham. In their careers as reactionaries, they
experience continual frustration at their inability to
win the bourgeoisie over to a "counter-Marxist"
worldview. Thus most of James Burnham's writings
are aimed at demonstrating how traditional bour-

geois ideology is an obstacle to understanding the
strength and danger of communism and how con-
flicts within the bourgeoisie are an obstacle to com-
batting communism. Burnham wrote an entire book
designed to prove that the dominant political atti-
tudes of the American ruling class were optimistical-
ly false. Burnham felt continually frustrated by
national capitalist rivalry, attacking Gaullism as a
petty-bourgeois deviation. European conservatives
found Burnham's hostility to DeGaulle, a successful
right-wing authoritarian, inexplicable or an expres-
sion of American chauvinism. Only an ideologue
familiarwith Marxism could place class unity (bour-
geois class unity) higher than national interest.
Burnham's attitude is totally unacceptable to the
bourgeois worldview, even when it is self-
consciously presented in the interest of the
bourgeoisie.

Historical vs. Immediate Interest

A common error in analyzing bourgeois class
consciousness is a tendency to anthropomorphize
class so that the bourgeoisie is seen to act rationally in
its long-term interests. To the bourgeois class are
attributed all kinds of individual characteristics —
volition, foresight, memory, etc. Associated with this
is a tendency to overstate the degree to which the state
shapes the economy, undervaluing the operations of
the market. It is important to realize the essentially
atomized nature of the bourgeoisie. The basic motive
force of bourgeois behavior is maximization of
individual firm profits. The degree to which actual
capitalists are willing to, or able to, sacrifice profit
maximization to some conception of the historic
interest of their class is quite limited. History is
replete with examples of individual capitalist appe-
tites undermining the general policy of the ruling
class. The classic example is the sale of U.S. scrap
metal to Japan during the diplomatic escalation
preceding World War II. The sugar beet lobby
proved a minor, but real, obstacle to the Eisenhower
administration's cutting the Cuban sugar quota in
1959, fearing that a reorganization of the U.S. sugar
import system would weaken its own monopolistic
position. Even where the majority of capitalists are
prepared to work for a certain policy, the mechan-
isms for doingso are faulty. The institution of private
property imposes strict limits on the state, which is
the main instrument of collective ruling-class action.
This is demonstrated by the relative inefficiency of
capitalist war planning even where the overwhelm-
ing majority of capitalists are genuinely trying to
cooperate.

Is the Bourgeoisie an International Class?

A fundamental question about bourgeois class
consciousness is whether the bourgeoisie is capable
of transcending national identity and interests for

AUTUMN 1977

25

some conception ofinternational class solidarity. On
this question turn both the tendency toward inter-
imperialist war and the likelihood and efficacy of
international interventions against proletarian revo-
lutions and resulting workers states.

Part ofthe disorientation of /4wm'caAj ideologues,
radical or otherwise, stemmed from the global
appetites of U.S. imperialism in the 1943-71 period
(Henry Luce's "American Century" and the U.S.
"obligation" to "defend the Free World"). This was
taken by some to reflect the American bourgeoisie's
transcendence of mere national aspirations. In fact,
what it constituted was a national ruling class pos-
sessing for a historical moment so much productive
power that it aspired to subordinate theentire planet
to U.S. domination — a very ordinary appetite writ
large.

The issue was first posed sharply in the Marxist
movement by Kautsky'stheory of ultra-imperialism,
which held that competition between imperialist
nations could be peacefully mediated in the same
manner as competition between domestic monopo-
lies. Lenin countered that the bourgeoisie cannot
transcend national interests and that inter-
imperialist agreements can only be based on the
existing balance of strength which all parties are
desperately seeking to change to their advantage.

That the tendency toward inter-imperialist war
exists despite its known de-stabilizing effects on the
bourgeois order is indicated by the last reported
meeting between the French ambassador Coulandre
and Hitler before the outbreak of World War IL
Both agreed that a prolonged war might well produce
proletarian revolutions ("only Trotsky will be the
victor," Coulandre is reported to have said). And yet
neither the French nor the German ruling class was
prepared to sacrifice its aim of national expansion to
prevent the revolutionary destruction of the bour-
geoisie which both considered a real eventuality.

The national character of the bourgeoisie is
demonstrated by the response to the Bolshevik
Revolution and Soviet state. While all the imperialist
powers intervened against the Bolsheviks, they were
incapable of cooperating, since the way in which
Bolshevik Russia was defeated would shape the
balance of world power. In 1923 the Soviet govern-
ment effected an agreement with the most reaction-
ary wing of the German ruling class to train the Red
Army. During the 1930's, despite talk of an anti-
Soviet crusade, when the crunch came all the capital-
ist powers determined their relations with the Soviet
Union on the basis of immediate national interest.
Germany effected an alliance with the Soviet Union,
then broke it when German leaders believed they had

a decisive military advantage. The Western powers
entered into an alliance with the Soviet Union when
they needed its military support. Japan remained
neutral despite its alliance with Germany. This does
not mean that unified international reaction against
a proletarian revolution is impossible, but the obsta-
cles to it are great, as each imperialist power sees its
own aggrandizement as the overriding goal.

While capable of certain acts and attitudes of
internationalist solidarity, the bourgeoisie is a na-
tionally limited class. It is capable neither of abolish-
ing national states nor, often, even of subordinating
immediate national interests to the historic defense
of the bourgeois order.

The class unity of the bourgeoisie is undermined
by its atomization into competing firms within each
state and by the inevitable conflicts between the
national bourgeoisies. The bourgeoisie is moreover
partly the creature of its own false consciousness,
bourgeois ideology. With its options limited by th'e
operation of the capitalist market and the declining
rate of profit, the bourgeoisie maneuvers within
circumscribed confines.

The bourgeoisie is not devoid of elemental class
instinct and short-term memory, enabling it to ma-
neuver in reaction to an immediate threat. When the
working class is disorganized and misled by reform-
ist, class-collaborationist leaderships, the capitalist
class can consolidate its position and stave off its
downfall even under the most threatening objective
conditions. In the 1930'^ the bourgeoisie seized upon
its last resort, fascism, a Bonapartist form of rule
which allows the capitalist state a relatively greater
degree of autonomy from the particular appetites of
sections of the class it represents. Followingthe 1968
general strike in France, the French bourgeoisie used
reformism rather than repression, granting econom-
ic concessions significant enough to undermine
France's competitive position in the world market
for a short period.

Thus the capitalist class is capable of maneuvering
to retain power granted one essential factor: the
absence of a revolutionary proletarian leadership
which seizes the initiative of the objective situation.
The lesson to be drawn from the failure of the
working class thus far to extend the one victorious
socialist revolution in Russia to the world-wide
triumph of proletarian power is not to credit the
bourgeoisie with omniscience or infinite maneuvera-
bility. The conclusion must be Trotsky's conclusion
of the crisis of proletarian leadership, which de-
mands the organization of the international Leninist
party to lead the working class in the conquest of
power. ■

26

SPARTACIST

OCI Slanders the Dubious
Varga...

(continued from page 32)

ostensibly Trotskyist organizations in France and else-
where to mask its right turn.

But the OCI did not reckon with the iSt. After seven
months of repeated requests, the OCI released a part (20
percent, by its own account) of the "Varga archives" in
August 1974. Seven months to xerox 200 pages!

Meanwhile, Varga was pursuing his mendicant methods.
In the late 1950's he had sought funds from the U.S. State
Department. Now his organization was running after the
iSt. not in order to engage in political discussion but simply
cynically in the naive hope of getting financing for its own
"international conference." [See "La LIRQI econduite en
fureur," Spartacist (edition fran^aise) No. 8, February
1975.]

In February 1975 the Spartacist tendency took the step
of publishing a long article entitled "A Workers Commis-
sion Must Try Varga." The article's main positions on
Varga and the OCI's baseless accusations were eventually
confirmed by the deliberations of the Commission of
Inquiry; our stand might have been drawn directly from the
Commission's conclusions. We wrote:

"Unfortunately, the irresponsible criminal conduct of the
OCI, which refused to present its case against Varga honestly
before the workers movement, is surpassed only by the
astonishingly light-minded response of the Varga group to
accusations which, if they are founded on fact, would define
this tendency as a sinister clique."

—Spartacist [Edition francaise], February 1975

While denouncing the OCI's Stalinist methods as "foreign
to the methodology and morality of Bolshevism," we
established that in his letters Varga "showed himself to be
anti-Semitic, racist and utterly cynical... a basically
dishonest individual [acting] in bad faith." [See box for
some characteristic excerpts from Varga's letters.]

From February until November 1975 the iSt,
represented by its French sympathizing section, the Ligue
Trotskyste de France (LTF), led the battle for an impartial
commission, without the participation of the accused
LIRQI. The record of this fight is detailed in our
"Declaration to the Commission of Inquiry on the Varga
Affair" of 3 November 1975. During this entire period the
SWP held itself aloof, no doubt hoping the Commission
would never see the light of day. Since at least the end of
1974 the SWP had been maneuvering with the OCI to
facilitate the latter's entry into the USec, and it was obvious
that a condemnation of the OCI's lies by an impartial and
authoritative commission of inquiry would damage these
maneuvers.

As for the LCR and LO, they never objected in principle
to participating in a commission which included the
LIRQI. LO went so far as to say that it was prepared to
accept the OCI into a commission alongside the LIRQI!
The iSt "Declaration" of 3 November was drawn up after a
meeting on 30 October 1975 during which the LCR and LO
had agreed to participate in a commission on the bases
proposed by the LIRQI— i.e., condemning in advance the
OCI's accusations. At the meeting where our declaration
was read, however, the LCR and LO pulled back from the
LIRQI "commission"— not for reasons of principle, but

solely for reasons of "efficiency" and "credibility."

Thus the Vargaites were in a position to accuse the LCR
and LO of capitulating to the iSt. This accusation was not
totally unfounded, as the LCR's and LO's hesitations are to
be explained above all by their factionally motivated desire
to condemn the OCI. Any means would have sufficed,
including the LIRQI's "commission." If these organiza-
tions surrendered to the principled arguments of the
representative of the LTF — a tiny organization compared
to the LCR and LO — it is no doubt because they believed
that a condemnation of the OCI by a commission which did
not include the LIRQI would have greater authority. The
recognized authority of the iSt regarding the "Varga affair"
also stemmed from the fact that we were the only
organization to check the OCI's translations of Varga's
[Hungarian-language] materials.

When its maneuver blew up in its face, the LIRQI set up
its own "commission of inquiry," of which it was in fact the
only component. Not content with accusing the LCR and
LO of capitulating to the iSt. an enraged LIRQI accused
the iSt of being agents of the OCI because of our principled
refusal to participate in the captive LIRQI commission.
As we said in our "Declaration":

"We cannot take part in a cynical operation totally devoid of
the most minimal democratic principles, whose only aim
appears to be to whitewash Varga in the hope of factional
advantage against the OCI. We are equally against
whitewashes and frame-ups."

— WV^o. 85, 14 November 1975

The Commission l\/leets

On LO's initiative, a real commission of inquiry was
formed in March 1976. From April until December 1976,
the Commission gathered testimony, documents, whatever
was relevant to the "Varga affair."

At the beginning, the OCI took a very aggressive attitude
toward the Commission. It repeatedly stated that the
Commission should confine itself to "authenticating" the
documents from Varga's archives, and congratulated itself
that the members of the Commission "admitted" the
^documents' authenticity. The OCI suggested over and over
in 10 (in June 1976 and again in October) that the iSt
shared its accusations against Varga. To make this
amalgam, the OCI quoted our criticisms of Varga (passing
over in silence our criticisms of the OCI) in a way calculated
to suggest that we shared its characterization of Varga. It
was only after the iSt addressed a letter of protest to /O that
the OCI ceased to put forth this kind of amalgam.

In throwing up this smokescreen, the OCI hoped to
obscure the fact that the real question was whether or not
the documents confirmed the OCI's accusations. It is now
established that they do not confirm the charges, which are
therefore revealed as slanders. All the more so since the
OCI representatives systematically refused to present cither
elements which might have aided in "proving" the
accusations; it must be concluded that "other" proofs do
not exist.

The OCI's attitude toward the Commission came out in
its refusal (despite its protestations to the contrary) to make
the entire archives available to the Commission or to
groups which had requested them. Testifying before the
Commission on 22 April 1976, Claude Chisserey of the
OCI leadership claimed that the 80 percent of the archives
which the OCI kept to itself consisted of bulletins and

AUTUMN 1977

27

documents internal to the OCI and thus he "saw no point"
in turning them over to the Commission— which, said
Chisserey, alluding disingenuously to the exchange of
internal bulletins between the OCI and SWP, the
Commission was certainly familiar with already. But the
SWP representative later stated that the SWP had never
received any such bulletins.

Later, the OCI refused to allow Pierre Broue and Jean-
Jacques Marie (who had collaborated with Varga on the
journal of his Institute) or Roger Monnier (with whom
Varga had left his archives) to testify before the
Commission.

Toward the end of the Commission's deliberations, the
OCI found itself obliged to testify once more. Unable to
reply to the questions posed by Commission members,
Pierre Lambert was repeatedly reduced to enraged
mutterings such as:

"Draw whatever conclusion you like, listen, it's your

business. I'm not here for that You're not here to ask me

questions about my organisation."

— testimony, 16 December 1976

Yet the OCI's utter irresponsibility at the time that Varga
joined emerges with perfect clarity from Lambert's
testimony. First of all, he admitted that Varga's archives
had been accessible to the OCI ever since Varga joined in
about 1962: "this was a fellow who kept his archives, at his
place everything was well classified, etc." Then Lambert
explicitly declared that, prior to Varga's joining, "nobody
asked him" for explanations of his political activity and
that "if we had asked him, he didn't have to say anything."
As for the OCI's attitude toward the Varga archives at that
time, Lambert was eloquent: "They were letters in
Hungarian mostly, in Russian. Not problems of direct

interest to us." As the Spartacist tendency said in our draft

conclusions, the OCI had:

"...a special responsibility to try to examine these archives,
given the central importance of a complete and unambiguous
break with imperialism on the part of those who claim to
have broken with the Stalinist bureaucracies in Eastern
Europe and the USSR."

But all these "prob4ems" — including the possibility of
agents infiltrating would-be Trotskyists' ranks— did not
"interest" the OCI!

Now, there are two possibilities. One, that the OCI is
telling the truth: it was not familiar with Varga's past,
because "there were no problems of direct interest" to the
OCI. In that case, it would seem that the OCI accepted
Varga without worrying in the least about possible
infiltration by police agents— KGB or (flA — into its
organization, without asking him the slightest question
about his previous political activity. Or two— and this
seems more likely — that the OCI was aware of Varga's
character and a good part of his past, but covered it up in
continued on next page

"The initial mistake was that neither Sanyi
nor you oriented to the State Department. In
my opinion, we have to do everything to
begin to orient so that normal links can be
created with the State Department."

— Balazs Nagy [M. Varga] to Sztaray
Zoltan, 19 December 1958

"About my characterization of Zinner, I'm
not an anti-semite either, but let's look
things in the face: the Jewish question
exists. I don't hate them, but I'm fed up with
their trying to act in our name; they are
trying to lead Hungarians without
understanding what it's about....
Fortunately the young Oxford Jews, for the
time being, listen to us more than the old
Jews, but for how long?"

— Nagy/Varga to Sztaray Zoltan,
4 June 1958

"In our reply we should give the impression
that he is a provocateur. . . In short, it is time
to exclude this dirty yid from the cultural
milieu."

— Nagy/Varga to Joska Molnar,
4 March 1959

"In my opinion the Belgians were wrong to
grant independence [to the Congo] with no
preparation, after a paternalistic
colonialism. They had a policy of treating
the Blacks like children and suddenly they
want to apply the most liberal of policies.
That won't work. But that's no reason for the
Blacks to be irresponsible."

—letter by Nagy/Varga, 9 August 1960

28

SPARTACIST

OCI Slanders the Dubious
Varga...

(continued from page 27)

order to show off its "Eastern European work." It is
certainly no accident that the OCI's noble concern about
the character of the main leader of its much-vaunted
"Eastern European work" dates from the emergence of
political differences with Varga.

For us as Trotskyists, it is essential to verify the total
break from any illusions that the Stalinist bureaucracy will
reform itself, as well as from Stalinophobia, on the part of
militants like Varga who come out of the degenerated and
deformed workers states, before accepting them as
members.

Still on the defensive, the OCI several months later drew
the Commission's attention to an interview with Varga in a
Spanish newspaper and, in one final brief, urged the
Commission to uphold "at least" the iSt's position:

"Starting from the documents, Varga canaot be
characterized — at the least — differently than did Spariacisi,
as a 'highly dubious' figure; i.e., to the extent that it is not a
question of a 'moral' characterization, as an individual who
had kept up a certain kind of relations with the imperialist
dens."

-letter, 8 March 1977

SWP: OCI's Best Defender

The Commission was also the scene of a factional
struggle between the two wings of the USec. In the
beginning, the SWP, trying its best to protect the OCI, did
not even want testimony taped! More generally, the SWP
representative systematically intervened to limit the scope
of criticisms against the OCI. In the last analysis, the SWP
had to grant that the OCI had proved nothing —and that
the OCI employs violence against competing organiza-
tions— but still maintained that the main culprit
was. . . Varga! It is the responsibility of the SWP above all
that the Commission's conclusions do not state the
obvious: the lack of proof of the OCI's accusations against
Varga renders them lying and slanderous. It was also the
SWP which insisted on weakening the rejection of the
accusations, substituting "these accusations have not been
proved" for "...have in no way been proved."

As for LO and the LCR, in their common aim of scoring
points on the OCI they maintained that Varga's past was of
interest only to his own organization and that a condemna-
tion of the OCI would suffice. Thus LO refused to draw the
obvious conclusion about Varga, already contained in the
draft conclusions submitted by the LTF representative,
mandated by the iSt:

"...although Varga himself publicly admitted having
undertaken consciously anti-communist activities in order to
'combat Marxism,' he has never explained — nor has he
explicitly renounced — certain formulations found in his
letters at that time, which enable us to characterize his
attitudes as anti-Semitic and racist. Varga therefore appears
as a highly dubious figure."

The LCR and LO wanted to condemn the OCI but
refused to characterize Varga's attitude; the SWP, by way
of contrast, was more than willing to characterize Varga,
but refused to condemn the OCI. Caught in a bind, the
Commission rejected the conclusions drafted by the iSt,

and called instead on the SWP reformists to write the most
innocuous conclusions possible. Though the LCR might
have preferred to condemn the OCI, it refused to break
with its partner in the USec rotten bloc.

Seizing the pretext that the conclusions did not
characterize the OCI's accusations against Varga as false
because unproved, LO refused to sign the conclusions. The
iSt, on the other hand, agreed to sign the Commission's
conclusions on the condition that an appended iSt
statement be published with them. While the conclusions
represented the absolute minimum of what had been
established by the Commission, the iSt signed them in the
interest of arriving at clear and authoritative conclusions.
LO's refusal to sign— under an obvious pretext— can only
undermine the Commission's authority and thus lessen the
impact of the very conclusions which LO claims to support.

All these petty and factionally motivated maneuvers
stand in complete contradiction with the methods and
traditions established by the Dewey Commission. While
maintaining a sense of historical proportion, we must recall
that Trotsky strongly insisted that — since the Dewey
Commission had amassed sufficient proofs to show that
Trotsky and Sedov were not guilty — it was both just and
necessary to take one step further and accept the moral and
political responsibility for drawing the conclusion that the
Moscow Trials were frame-ups.

In opposition to all the other organizations participating
in the Commission, the iSt assumes this responsibility in
drawing a two-sided conclusion: since the OCI has adduced
no sufficient proof to back up its accusations against
Varga, these accusations must be characterized as false and
therefore lying and slanderous. The OCI's practice of
violence against the Vargaites is therefore shown to be
drawn from the Stalinist arsenal. On the other hand,
Varga's refusal to explain himself — his past and the content
of his letters — shows him to be a shady character, a "highly
dubious" figure. ^

\

INTERNATIONAL SPARTACIST
TENDENCY DIRECTORY

LIGUE TROTSKYSTE DE FRANCE

Pascal Alessandri

B.P. 336, 75011 Paris
LONDON SPARTACIST GROUP

BCM Box 4272

London, WC1V 6XX
SPARTACIST LEAGUE OF

AUSTRALIA/NEW ZEALAND , .

GPO Box 3473

Sydney, NSW, 2001, Australia
SPARTACIST LEAGUE/U.S.

Box 1377, GPO

New York, NY 10001
TROTSKYIST LEAGUE OF CANADA

Box 7198, Station A

Toronto, Ontario
TROTZKISTISCHE LIGA DEUTSCHLANDS

Postfach 11 0647

1 Berlin 11

AUTUMN 1977

29

Conclusions of the Commission of
Inquiry into the Varga Affair

—reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 165,
8 July 1977

Michel Varga (the political pseudonym used by Balasz
Nagy) is today the main leader of the Ligue Internationale
de Reconstruction de la Quatrieme Internationale (Inter-
national League Reconstructing the Fourth Internation-
al— LIRQI), which now simply proclaims itself the
"Fourth International." After the 1956 uprising in
Hungary he emigrated to West Europe and, in the late
1950's, became a founder of the "Imre Nagy Institute of
Political Science" and of its journal. Etudes. The purpose
of this institute, as Varga presented it in 1958, was to
analyze problems of socialism, particularly the problems of
Hungary from 1948 to 1956. For these projects Varga
entered into contact with various groups and individuals in
the workers movement.

In 1961 Michel Varga broke with the Institute and the
journal. In 1962 he joined the Organisation Communiste
Internationaliste (OCI). Toward the end of 1972 a split
occurred between a group led by Varga and the OCI. The
group founded by Varga first took the name OCI-LIRQI
Faction.

In 1973 the OCI published material (translated from
Hungarian) excerpted from Varga's archives which it had
obtained. This material dealt with the period of 1957-1960,
and the excerpts published by the OCI are mostly parts of
Varga's correspondence. On the basis of these excerpts, the
OCI accused Varga of being an agent of the CIA and the
KGB.

On 27 March 1976 the Ligue Communiste Revolution-
naire, Lutte Ouvriere, Socialist Workers Party USA, the
international Spartacist tendency and the Workers
Socialist League (Great Britain) decided to form a
Commission of Inquiry on the basis of the following
declaration:

"Some time ago, the Organisation Communiste Internatio-
naliste (OCI) put forth certain accusations, asserting that
Balasz Nagy, known as Michel Varga, was an 'agent paid by
the CIA' and *a GPU provocateur.' The leaders of the LI RQI,
the organization of which Michel Varga is a member, have
called for a 'workers commission of inquiry' to take a
position on 'the campaign of unfounded accusations
launched by the OCI leadership' as well as on 'the extension
of these accusations to the International League [LIRQI] as
such, going as far as repeated physical attacks upon militants
of the OCI-LIRQI faction [the French LIRQI group], in
particular during the joint demonstrations against Franco-
ism and the leafletting outside the meeting to free Soviet
mathematician Leonid Plyushch.'

"We consider that such accusations against a militant or an
organization are sufficiently serious that it is incumbent
upon the entire revolutionary movement to determine
whether or not they are justified. That is why we have decided
to constitute ourselves as a Commission of Inquiry for the
purpose of inviting the OCI leadership to present all evidence
it claims to possess, and in order to request all those who
could furnish evidence concerning this matter to come and
testify.

"The Commission's goal is a scrupulous verification of the
facts and documents, which it will make public. In order for

this verification to take place with the greatest possible
authority, it invites all organizations claiming adherence to
the revolutionary workers movement to participate actively
in its deliberations."

— signed by representatives of:
Lutte Ouvriere

Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire
Socialist Workers Party
international Spartacist tendency
Workers Socialist League '

After a year of proceedings, the Commission of Inquiry
now feels that it has come to its end. It has recorded
testimony and sought to verify it to the degree possible.

For practical reasons, the representative of the Workers
Socialist League was unable to participate regularly in the
Commission's work. Five persons participated regularly:
Andre Frys (LO), Andre Roussel (LO), Gus Horowitz
(SWP), Georges Marion (LCR) and Jean Lesueur (iSt).
This report is made by the following three participants in
the Commission of Inquiry: Gus Horowitz (SWP), Jean
Lesueur (iSt), Georges Marion (LCR).

I Preliminary Conclusions

The members of the Commission of Inquiry, at the end
of their proceedings, wish to formulate the following
preliminary observations dealing with the ongoing devel-
opment of the inquiry itself.

1) On two occasions members of the OC} — first Claude
Chisserey and Gerard Bloch, then Pierre Lambert— agreed
to answer the Commission's questions. But numerous
letters and requests by the Commission of Inquiry for
testimony from other members of the OCI remain
unanswered by the OCI. Pierre Lambert, for one, stated
concerning this matter: "We will not allow the Commission
of Inquiry to investigate inside the OCI. The goal of your
Commission is to state whether the documents produced
by the OCI are authentic or not." Concerning the use of
violence by members of the OCI against the LIRQI,
subsequently the LOR [Revolutionary Workers League]
(name adopted by the French section of the LIRQI), the
OCI representatives denied this, or refused to reply.

2) It was at the request of the LIRQI that the
organizations making up the Commission of Inquiry
decided to form it. But the LIRQI demanded that the
Commission of Inquiry be formed on the basis of an
a priori recognition that the OCTs accusations were
slanders. Seeing that the organizations in question did not
share its point of view, the LIRQI then formed its own
commission of inquiry, the "Commission of Inquiry
against the Slanders about Michel Varga," of which it is in
fact the only member. Subsequently, on one occasion,
LIRQI members agreed to testify before the Commission
on the question of the[OCrs] use of violence. Rejecting the

continued on next page

30

SPARTACIST

Conclusions on Varga Affair . . .

(continued from page 29)

Commission in advance as a "maneuver," Michel Varga
explicitly refused any collaboration with the Commission.

II Basic Conclusions

Despite the attitude of the OCI and the LOR toward the
Commission of Inquiry, the undersigned members of it
have arrived at the following conclusions, which they share
in common:

1) Was Varga a KGB agent?

The OCI has not furnished any evidence proving that
Michel Varga had relations with the KGB or the Soviet
government. According to the words of the OCI leaders
themselves, this accusation is based solely on "political
reasoning."

According to the Commission, this accusation is
therefore unproved.

2) Was Varga a CIA agent?

In order to assert this, the OCI bases itself mainly on the
"Varga archives" relating to the period 1957-1960.

These archives show that during this period, after leaving
Hungary and before joining the OCI, Michel Varga sought
financial support from many sources, including sources
close to the American government, the [U.S.] State
Department or the Free Europe Committee, in order to
finance the Imre Nagy Institute. The archives show that he
actively sought this money, knowing full well what he was
doing and attempting to hide the source of the money.

But these archives do not prove that at this time Varga
was a CIA agent. They do not prove that Varga was a CIA
agent after he joined the ranks of the OCI in 1962, nor that
he had contact with the CIA during this period.

According to the Commission, the accusation that he
belonged to the CIA is therefore unproved.

3) Did the OCI know of Varga's past before accepting
him in its ranks?

There are no documents which make it possible to
answer this question.

• In the LIRQI's publications, Michel Varga has asserted
that the OCI was fully informed about his past before he
joined its ranks. But Michel Varga refused to give his
testimony to the Commission.

• As for the OCI, it has reasserted that it did not know of
Varga's past as it appears in light of the archives. Pierre
Lambert repeated this in his testimony before the
Commission of Inquiry.

• The Commission also heard the testimony of Albi and
Kaldy, two Hungarian militants presently members of the
LCR and LO respectively, who worked with Varga after
1962 in his Hungarian Trotskyist organization, the LRSH
[Revolutionary League of Hungarian Socialists]. Accord-
ing to their statements, the OCI was in possession of
sufficient information about Varga's past to have warrant-
ed suspicion concerning the source of financing for the
Imre Nagy Institute. However, Pierre Lambert testified
that in 1962 the OCI had no grounds for such suspicion.

• Two OCI leaders, Pierre Broue and Jean-Jacques Marie,
collaborated with the journal edited by the Imre Nagy
Institute, Etudes, on several occasions prior to 1962. They
therefore at least knew of the Institute's existence. But the
Commission was unable to hear their testimony concerning

the extent of their knowledge of the Institute in this period,
due to the OCI's refusal [to allow them to testify]. For the
same reason it was unable to hear testimony from Roger
Monnier, the OCI member with whom Varga had
deposited his archives.

The Commission is therefore not in a position to know
whether the OCI learned about the archives only in 1973.

4) The use of violence.

The Commission heard testimony indicating that on
several occasions the OCI has used violence against LIRQI
members in order to prevent them from distributing their
press, and not in self-defense. This testimony comes from
different individuals and different organizations.

The Commission is therefore convinced that these
attacks did indeed take place. It is inadmissible for an
organization in the workers movement to act in this
fashion, and this must stop.

The Commission of Inquiry's minutes are public in
nature, before the entire working-class movement, in order
to allow all working-class militants who may so desire to
form their own opinion. The Commission makes the entire
workers movement judge of the "Varga affair" and of the
attitude adopted by its protagonists.

Paris, 29 May 1977

signed by:

Gus Horowitz (Socialist Workers Party)

Jean Lesueur (international Spartacist tendency)*

Georges Marion (Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire)

* The international Spartacist tendency wishes to note that it
votes in favor of these conclusions with the following
reservations, whose reproduction constitutes a condition to
signing the conclusions:

1 ) The OCI's unproved accusations must be characterized as
slanders; f

2) Varga's current attitude, namely to refuse to shed light on
his past, must lead to characterizing him as a suspicious and
highly dubious individual;

3) The OCI's use of violence against Varga's supporters must
be characterized as deriving from Stalinist methods.

SPARTACIST LEAGUE/U.S.
LOCAL DIRECTORY

BERKELEY/OAKLAND (415) 835-1535

Box 23372, Oakland, CA 94623

Public Office: 1634 Telegraph (3rd floor), Oakland
BOSTON (617) 492-3928

Box 188, M.l.T. Station, Cambridge, MA 02139
CHICAGO (312) 427-0003

Box 6441, Main P.O., Chicago, IL 60680

Public Office: 523 So. Plymouth Court {3rd floor)
CLEVELAND (216) 566-7806

Box 6765, Cleveland, OH 44101
DETROIT (313) 868-9095

Box 663A, GPO, Detroit, Ml 48232
LOS ANGELES (213) 662-1564

Box 26282, Edendale Sta., Los Angeles, CA 90026
NEW YORK (212) 925-2426

Box 1377, GPO, New York, NY 10001

Public Office: 260 W. Broadway, Rm. 522
SAN FRANCISCO (415) 564-2845

Box 5712, San Francisco, CA 94101

AUTUMN 1977

31

Draft Conclusions on the Varga Affair
Submitted by the iSt

—reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 165,
8 July 1977

The Commission of Inquiry was formed by Lutte
Ouvriere, the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire, the
SociaHst Workers Party and the international Spartacist
tendency, with the sole aim of arriving at conclusions about
the "Varga affair." Although composed of organizations
otherwise having serious political differences among
themselves, the Commission is united in its determination
to safeguard the workers movement against the alien
practices of violence and slander and to denounce such
practices whenever they may occur, thereby rejecting any
attempt to turn it into the tool of any political alliance or
regroupment.

On the basis of testimony and documents presented to it,
the Commission of Inquiry has arrived at the following
conclusions:

1 . The Commission notes that, although representatives
of the OCI twice appeared before it, the OCl in fact refused
to collaborate with the Commission of Inquiry, above all
by not turning over to it the entire documentation at its
disposal; and by refusing to allow testimony from its
members who, based on their own experience, could have
answered the Commission's questions — on the pretext that
the Commission should limit itself to stating whether or not
the documents presented by the OCl were authentic or not.

2. The Commission also denounces the attitude of the
LIRQI and its organizations toward the Commission.
With the failure of the LIRQI's attempts to prevent the
creation of an independent Commission of Inquiry in the
best traditions of the workers movement — in particular
that represented by the Dewey Commission— the LIRQI
set up a so-called "impartial" commission composed
overwhelmingly of its own organizations! The LIRQI's
slanders of the Commission, which it terms "Lambertist
agents," merely show its impotent fury following the
refusal by the organizations which formed the Commission
to cover for its maneuvers.

3. The OCI did not present any sufficient proof to
demonstrate the correctness of its accusations against
Balasz Nagy, known as Michel Varga; namely that Michel
Varga was supposedly a paid agent of the CIA and KGB.
Moreover, the OCl dishonestly manipulated the quota-
tions it extracted from Varga's letters. The testimony,
documents and information gathered by the Commission
lead to the conclusion that these accusations can only be
considered false, and therefore lying and slanderous.

4. It goes without saying that the Commission of Inquiry
condemns the OCI's procedures, which are of a Stalinist
nature. The OCl may have been familiar with the "Varga
archives." It is quite probable that it at least knew of their
existence. The OCI therefore had a special responsibility to
try to examine these archives, given the central importance
of a complete and unambiguous break with imperialism on
the part of those who claim to have broken with the
Stalinist bureaucracies in Eastern Europe and the USSR.
Thus the OCI chose to launch a slanderous campaign.

whose sole aim was to intimidate and discredit Varga, only
after his political differences with the OCl appeared.

5. The Commission condemns the scandalous light-
mindedness of Michel Varga, who refused to appear before
it or to make any deposition. He has thereby refused to
clarify his present position vis-a-vis his past activities.
Consequently, the Commission can only notfe the fact that
between 1957 and 1960-61 Varga consciously solicited
funds from sources functioning as agents of American
imperialism, and even from the U.S. State Department.
And although Varga himself publicly admitted having
undertaken consciously anti-communist activities in order
to "combat Marxism," he has never explained — nor has he
explicitly renounced — certain formulations to be found in
his letters at that time, which enable us to characterize his
attitudes as anti-Semitic and racist. Varga therefore
appears as a highly dubious figure.

6. According to depositions taken by the Commission of
Inquiry, the OCl has for a long time practiced violence
against competing organizations in the workers movement.
The OCl simply used its unfounded accusations against
Varga as a pretext — following the emergence of political
differences — to physically attack members of organiza-
tions which included Varga. The Commission vigorously
condemns the OCl for its slanders and its violence of a
purely Stalinist sort, alien to the best practices of the
workers movement.

In addition, the fact that the LIRQI invoked bourgeois
justice against members of the OCl demonstrates that
despite its protestations, it does not fundamentally differ
from the OCl on the question of workers democracy.

[Paris, December 1976]

YOUNG
SPARTACUS

Monthly
Newspaper
of the
Spartacus
Youth League,
Youth Section
of the

Spartacist League

$2 • 10 ISSUES

Make checks payable/mail to:

Spartacus Youth Publishing Co.. Box 825, Canal Street Station
New York, New York 10013

32

SPARTACIST

AUTUMN 1977

Varqa Commission Finishes Work

OCI Slanders the Dubious Varga

7776" following article is adapted from the introduction to a
French-language bulletin of documents relating to the
Commission of Inquiry into the " Varga affair" recently
published by the Ligue Trotskyste de France, sympathizing
section of the international Spartacist tendency (iSt).

By reprinting materials published in Workers Vanguard
and Spartacist (edition fran<;aise) over the past two and a
half years, Documents sur "I'affaire Varga" documents the
struggle waged by the iSt for a genuinely impartial
commission of inquiry into the serious charges leveled
against Michel Varga by the Organisation Communiste
Internationaliste (OCI).

It includes the statement of the iSt to the cover-up
"commission" created by the Vargaites (see Workers Van-
guard No. 85, 14 November 1975): correspondence regard-
ing the formation of the Commission of Inquiry: exchanges
between its members and the Vargaites documenting Var-
gas refusal to testify before the Commission: excerpts from
testimony to the Commission by Pierre Lambert of the OCI,
Franco Grisolia and several former members of the Vargaite
organization: a list of documents and testimony received by
the Commission: and the concluding report of the Commis-
sion as wellas draft conclusions submitted by the iSt, both of
which are also reprinted below.

The bulletin may he ordered from Pascal Alessandri,
B.P. 336 . 75011 Paris. France, or from Spartacist
Publishing Co.. Box 1377. G PO. New York. N. Y. WOOL

The documents reproduced in this bulletin testify tQthe
struggle by the international Spartacist tendency (iSt) to
construct, and then to carry through to a conclusion, the
work of a commission of inquiry to investigate the "Varga
affair." They document efforts by the Organisation
Communiste Internationaliste (OCI) and the Vargaite
group (LIRQl, which now styles itself the "Fourth
International") first to block even the existence of an
impartial commission in the tradition of the Dewey
commission of inquiry into the Moscow Trials, and then to
create obstacles to the Commission's work. And they reveal
the equivocations of the other organizations — the Ligue
Communiste Revolutionnaire (LCR), LutteOuvriere(LO)
and the American Socialist Workers Party (SWP)— which
participated in the Commission.

Origins of the Commission

Although increasingly sharp political differences
separated the OCI and Varga since at least September 1972,
it was not until the end of June 1973, after the "discovery"
of Varga's archives around May 1973, that the OCI
publicly accused Varga — falsely, as the Commission
established -of being an agent of the Stalinist secret police
(Informations Ouvrieres, 27 June 1973) and, later, of the
CIA as well. It subsequently took more than six months for

the OCI to state that working-class organizations could
examine these archives, and it was not until March 1974
that a pamphlet announced in the first lO article finally
appeared.

The "Varga affair" went hand in hand with a very rapid
right turn of the OCI, expressed above all by its
capitulation before the popular front in the 1973 and 1974
elections, as well as its rapprochement, beginning in early
1973, with the reformist SWP. In a centrist organization
such as the OCI, the formation of a left tendency opposing
the leadership's right turn might have been expected. And
in fact wobbles showed up in lO which looked like the
stirrings of left oppositionists in the OCI. But the "Varga
affair" cut short any potential crystallization of a serious
left tendency in the OCI. Just as the Vargaites cynically
sought to take up positions to the left of the OCI, so too the
OCI took advantage of its accusations against Varga to seal
off anything resembling an opposition. It was obvious that
at the outset the OCI was counting on the disinterest of the

continued on page 26

SPARTAOST

NUMBER 25

SUMMER 1978

50 CENTS

SL Confronts USec Leader on U.S-Tour

Ernest Mandel:
A Centrist For
All Seasons

An abbreviated version of this article was distributed at a
meeting in New York on May 4 where Mandel spoke on the
world economic crisis. For an account of this meeting see
"Mandel Weasels on Pop Front," Workers Vanguard No.
205. 12 Mav 1978.

Ernest Mandel is a world-class left-wing academic, jet-
setting from continent to continent to give lectures and
interviews, a prolific author of books and articles, a "star"
whose views are eagerly sought by trendy publications and
even the most stuffy bourgeois newspapers and journals of
opinion. He is perhaps the best-known of the fraternity of
economists who claim the Marxist tradition, and much
closer to orthodox Leninism than a Sweezy or Bettelheim.
He is, finally, the very image of an engage intellectual,
darting from classrooms at Louvain or Berlin's "Free
University" to meetings of the "United Secretariat of the
Fourth International" of which he is the principal
spokesman, to conferences with planning officials in
Havana. To the mass media and imperialist governments
Ernest Mandel is the embodiment of the "Trotskyite
menace," a bete noir to be stopped at borders by secret
police or excluded by McCarthyite legislation.

Leaving aside the periodic reactionary hysteria about a
"terrorist Fourth International," Mandel enjoys a positive
reputation across an amazingly broad spectrum, ranging
from out-and-out liberals to unblushing Stalinists. This
contrasts so sharply with the opprobrium and persecution
directed against Leon Trotsky and the Fourth Internation-
alist communists of his day that one is moved to ask why.
If this man is the irreconcilable opponent of all existing re-
gimes of class rule or bureaucratic oppression on the plan-
et, the resolute defender of authentic Marxism and Lenin-
ism against every hue of revisionism, a fiery denouncer
of those who betray the cause of the proletariat — then why

continued on page 2

Spartacist

Ernest Mandel speaking in New York City on May 4.

"Radical Egalitarian"
Stalinism: A Post
Mortem 6

Swedish USec Face to Face
with Trotskyism 32

2

SPARTACIST

Mandel...

isn't he universally hated? The answer is simple: Ernest
Mandel is not a Trotsky ist but an impostor. Anybody who
c ame to hear a genuine Bolshevik- Leninist should ask for
his money back.

In reality, although he knows quite well what Bolshevik
intransigence is and can write an orthodox polemic as
facilely as he churns out opportunist apologetics, for the
last quarter century Mandel has fought against a Trotskyist
perspective and program at every crucial juncture. He has
employed his agile mind and his impressive erudition to
dream up revisionist "theoretical" cover for every petty-
bourgeois radical opportunist craze: student power,
peasant-guerrilla "armed struggle," popular frontism. In
the 1 960's when "student power" was in its heyday he joined
right in the New Left fad. Rather than emphasizing that the
proletariat was still the key, he wrote that the workers'
struggles had been bought off under "neocapitalism," and
his supporters advocated a program for "red universities."
When "Che" Guevara was a cult hero on the campuses
Mandel, far from insisting on the need for a Leninist
proletarian vanguard party to lead the struggles of the
working masses, became an armchair guerrillero and
ordered his followers to join Castro's guerrillaist "Interna-
tional," the stillborn OLAS.

Today he is again chasing after the latest fashionable
trends in Europe: popular frontism and Eurocommunism.
Where Trotsky called proletarian opposition to the
Popular Front the key to revolutionary strategy in this
epoch and "the best criterion for the difference between
Bolshevism and Menshevism," Mandelites in France
refused to label the Union of the Left a popular front and,
fearful of "isolation," followed the masses in voting for its
candidates. And while the Eurocommunists are caught up
in Jimmy Carter's anti-Soviet "human rights" campaign,
Mandel says he has "hopes and confidence" that inveterate
reformist traitors like Spanish CP leader Carrillo— who
crossed a picket line at Yale to demonstrate his apprecia-
tion to the State Department for letting him visit

SPARTAOST

(Fourth Internationalist)
An Organ of Revolutionary Marxism

EDITORIAL BOARD; Charles O'Brien (managing), Elizabeth Gordon,
William Logan, James Robertson, Joseph Seymour, John Sharps,
David Strachan

PRODUCTION MANAGERS: Darlene Kamiura, Ron Wallace
CIRCULATION MANAGER: Mike Beech

Published for the Interim Secretariat of the international Spartacist
tendency, in accord with the "Declaration for the Organizing of an
International Trotskyist Tendency," by the Spartacist Publishing
Company, Box 1377, GPO, New York, N.Y. 10001.
Telephone: 966-6841.

Opinions expressed in signed articles or letters do not necessarily
express the editorial viewpoint.

Number 25 f^-t xsaa Summer 1978

America — "will return to the path of revolutionary
Marxism"!

Even people who are relatively unacquainted with
Trotskyism can easily see that such a man has nothing to do
with the heroic Left Oppositionists whose leader was slain
on Stalin's orders in 1940. For if student power sponta-
neists, Guevarist guerrillaists and the popular front can
lead the revolutionary struggle, then who needs Trotskyist
parties? In fact, if the Stalinist reformists of the Spanish CP
can "return" to revolutionary Marxism, then Trotsky was
dead wrong in writing off the Comintern as definitively
gone over to the side of the bourgeoisie after Stalin allowed
Hitler to march to power unhindered in 1933. Then the
founding of the Fourth International five years later was, at
best, a terrible mistake.

"The Many Faces and Long Waves of Ernest
Mandel"

In New York Mandel will be speaking on the world
economic crisis. It is on the subject of economics that he has
gained renown as a popularizer and interpreter of Marx in
the period of monopoly capitalism. His textbook, Marxist
Economic Theory, is the most widely read volume of its
kind, and Mandel has a certain aura of theoretical
innovation, such as his rediscovery (elaborated in his book
Late Capitalism) of the "long wave" theories of the Russian
economist Kondratiev. He often appears to be orthodox
compared to other pseudo-Marxist economists, such as
Paul Sweezy who distorts the labor theory of value to
justify his New Left theory of a crisis-free monopoly
capitalism; or Charles Bettelheim, who has to redefine
capitalism in order to justify the Maoist dogma that the
USSR is "social-imperialist." But in reality, Mandel's
economic writings are stepchildren to his political
appetites, the purest impressionism dressed up in Marxoid
jargon.

To take but one example, just why did our "theoretician"
come up with Kondratiev "long waves"? (His contention is
that the period between 1945 and 1966 was a "long post-
war phase of rapid growth," during which supposedly
effective countercyclical capitalist state policies made the
recurrence of a 1929-style crash impossible. In contrast, we
are— according to his view— currently in a long-term
downturn in which the economic struggles of labor run up
against the bosses' profit greed.) To begin with, Mandel has
no economic data to back up his contentions: none are
available in the 19th century, he deliberately ignores- the
mid- and late-1920's boom to show the entire interwar
period as a down wave, and the "post-war boom" is a
myth — being quite uneven internationally, with plenty of
ups and downs.

No, the origin of Mandel's long wave theory is political,
not economic. It is a dishonest, objectivist mea^s of
excusing the fact that during the 1960's he wrote off the
working class of the imperialist countries as a revolutiona-
ry force. At that time he did not refer to "late capitalism"
but "neocapitalism" based on the "third industrial
revolution" of automation and nuclear power. In his
brochure. An Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory,
Mandel states that: "The neo-capitalist phase which we are
now witnessing, is that of a long term expansion of

capitalism " This directly contradicts the Leninist thesis

that the imperialist epoch is that of the f^eco v of productive

SUMMER 1978

3

forces — "the death agony of capitalism" as Trotsky put it in
the title of the founding program of the Fourth
International.

And what are the implications of this long-term
expansion? Mandel writes:

"The long term cycle which began with the Second World
War, and in which we still remain. .. has, on the contrary,
been characterized by expansion, and because of this
expansion the margin for negotiation and discussion
between the bourgeoisie and the working class has been
enlarged. The possibility has been created for strengthening
the system on the basis of granting concessions to the
workers. .. close collaboration between an expansive bour-
geoisie and the conservative forces of the labor movement
and is fundamentally sustained by a rising trend in the
standard of living of the workers."

— An Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory

Try presenting that line to the petty-bourgeois radical
milieu today! Mandel would be laughed off the stage. But
at the time this was a popular theme of all the "new working
class" theories and, as always, our "Marxist" economist
picked up what was in vogue and elaborated a theory to fit
the superficial impression.

As for the bosses' willingness to "buy off" the workers, it
suffices to recall the brutality with which the American
bourgeoisie beat down the 1959 steel strike to expose this
claim.

But Mandel's theory is more than a distortion of the
facts: it is an excuse for betrayal. The most concrete case is
his own treacherous behavior in the 1960-61 Belgian
general strike (an event which according to his schema of
"neocapitalism" should never have occurred). Mandel was
editor of a newspaper, Lm Gauche, which posed as the voice
of a broad left wing in the Belgian Socialist Party (similar
to the Tribune in England today) under the mantle of
Andre Renard, a leading union bureaucrat. La Gauche was
putting forward at the time a program of "structural
reforms" including abolition of the "/o/ unique"' (the
Christian Democratic government's anti-labor austerity
program), nationalization of the power industry, govern-
ment economic planning, controls on the monopolies,
halving the military budget, etc. In other words, an
extremely modest social-democratic reform program.

As a general strike developed against the loi unique,
when the workers were demanding in mass meetings
"Down with" the Eyskens government!" Mandel's La
Gauche wrote on 24 December 1960 that "The workers fear
that if the government falls in the present social crisis, the
Belgian Socialist Party will enter a new coalition
government. . . ." This, he said, would only be acceptable if
"1) the new government abandoned the hi unique, 2) if the
essential points in the structural reforms be kept as
government policy." So in the name of "structural reforms"
Mandel announced his acceptance of a bourgeois coalition
government!

But this was not all. The 1 January 1961 edition of La
Gauche carried a red headline: "Organize the March on
Brussels!" Unfortunately for Mandel he had jumped the
gun on his mentor Renard, who was not about to provoke a
showdown with the Eyskens government. The next week
La Gauche argued against concentrating forces on a single
time and place and instead called for guerrilla tactics, and

The Newsletter

Belgian general strike of 1960-61: Mandel withdrew
call for march on Brussels when "left" bureaucrat
Renard refused to support It.

by 14 January Mandel felt constrained to publish a

cringing capitulation:

"We have been reproached for having launched the slogan of

a march on Brussels Since we find that the demand has

not been taken up by the leaders, we submit; but we poiht out
that at the moment our call appeared last week, no
indications on this subject were yet known."

It's true, of course. Had Mandel known Renard was
strongly opposed to a march he would never have issued a
call.

Another of the topics Mandel is speaking on during his
current tour is the Paris May events of 1968. What he will
not mention, however, is how his theory of "neocapitalism"
led him to put forward a program telling the working
masses not to fight for state power! At the time there were
ten million workers on strike, threatening to break through
the bureaucratic control of the CP and the unions.
However, since "there is not yet a sufficiently influential,
organized, unified vanguard, to the left of the CP, that
could lead the masses to victory immediately," Mandel
wrote, "It is here that the strategy of anti-capitalist
structural reforms, 'transitional demands,' assumes all its
validity" {Militant, 14 June 1968). For Trotskyists
transitional demands are part of a program "unalterably
leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by
the proletariat." Mandel, however, proclaimed that "the
masses cannot seize power" and therefore called for
"structural reforms" (workers control of production,
opening company books, end of bank secrecy) which were
explicitly not seen as a challenge to capitalist rule but only
as "guarantees."

By the 1970's Mandel was no longer talking of "neo-
capitalism" and he soon discovered that the long wave of
continued on next page

4

SPARTACIST

Mandel...

the "post-war boom" had now headed downwards. What
had changed, however, was not the economic situation.
The economic conditions in France in 1968 and during
Italy's "hot autumn" of 1969 were similar to the early
1960's. What happened was that in the French May events,
the student vanguardists Mandel had been tailing discov-
ered the working class. As the Maoist/syndicalist groups
began to grow, the Mandelites, threatened with being
outflanked on their left, shifted gears and began chasing
after a "new mass [later, broad] vanguard" including
radicalized workers. Mandel's current economic progno-
ses, while superficially more orthodox than his "neocapi-
talist" contortions, are in reality no closer to Trotskyism.
They merely serve as an excuse for tailing after spontane-
ous working-class militancy and refusing to raise the full
transitional program in the unions.

The Measure of the Man: How Mandel Became a
Pabioist

Ernest Mandel broke with Trotskyism more than 25
years ago at a time of a great crisis in the Fourth
International which led to a split in 1953 and the
consequent destruction of the FI as the world party of
socialist revolution. The cause of this terrible blow to world
Trotskyism was Pabioist liquidationism, and after an
initial hesitant step to oppose this revisionist current,
Mandel soon broke and served as a lawyer, 4 cover for the
liquidators. This capitulation revealed a key aspect of his
character— /?o////ca/ cowardice— which is incompatible
with being a revolutionary leader. Ever since, Mandel has
been essentially an intellectual prostitute, a pen for hire to
whatever is the left cause of the moment. It is this which
explains his wide popularity, for he takes up whatever is in
style this season. But the price of this popularity is a
constant refusal to provide revolutionary leadership — "to
tell the truth to the masses, no matter how bitter it may be."

In the late I940's the Stalinist parties of West Europe,
particularly France and Italy, were able to greatly extend
and consolidate their influence as a result of their leading
role in the resistance to Nazi occupation. The forces of the
Fourth International, which had been greatly weakened
through assassination by both the Stalinists and fascists
during World War II, were largely on the margins of the
workers movement. At the same time the onset of the Cold
War led to a hardening of the Kremlin line, while the
appearance of bureaucratically deformed workers states in
East Europe and China led impressionists to conclude that
perhaps the Stalinists could be forced to the left.

It was under these circumstances that the pressures of
isolation took their toll on the Fourth International. The
revisionist current which appeared was led by Michel
Pablo, the head of the International Secretariat of the FI.
In a January 1951 article entitled "Where Are We Going?"
Pablo developed his "war/ revolution" thesis according to
which World War III between the U.S. and the USSR was
imminent, and the West European workers movement
would be subordinated to this dynamic. Moreover, under
the pressure of the masses, wrote Pablo, "The Communist
Parties retain the possibility in certain circumstances of
roughly outlining a revolutionary orientation." Therefore,

Popular-Front French Union of the Left: handshake
of class collaboration.

seeing the possibility of revolutionary situations develop-
ing before the Trotskyist vanguard could amass signifi-
cant resources, Pablo called for a policy of "entrism sui
generis" in which the sections of the FI would enter the
mass Stalinist and social-democratic parties with the
perspective of staying there for a long period to pressure the
reformists to the left.

This program deprived the Fourth International of its
reason for existence. Consequently resistance to Pablo's
schema began to appear in many sections. When the
leadership of the French section refused to go along with
the recipe for "deep entrism" in the Communist Party,
Pablo declared them suspended, in a bureaucratic move
worthy of a petty Stalin. The first opposition to Pabloism,
interestingly, came in the form of a document by Ernest
Germain (the party name of Mandel), which became
known as the "Ten Theses." On the face of it this was just a
restatement of home truths about the counterrevolutionary
policies of Stalinism. In actuality, though it bent over
backwards not to attack Pablo by name, this was a veiled
attack on the program put forward in "Where Are We
Going?" Germain's tenth thesis stated:

". . . it is because the new revolutionary wave contains in
embryo the destruction of the Stalinist parties as such that we
ought to be much closer tod^y to the Communist workers.
This is only one phase of our fundamental task: to construct
new revolutionary parties."

Mandel/Germain, however, was not able to get the
Pablo-dominated International Secretariat to adopt his
theses. Having no stomach for a hard factional struggle —
even though the very existence of the Fourth International
was at stake — he succumbed to Pablo's pressures.
Subsequently he became the hatchetman for the dictatorial
general secretary against the majority leadership of the
French section (PCI), which had supported his now-

SUMMER 1978

5

abandoned "Ten Theses." In response to this cowardly
treachery, Favre-Bleibtreu, head of the French anti-
Pabloists wrote to Germain in July 1951:

"We always take the same pleasure in reading your
documents, whose cultural level, richness of imagery, and
style remind us that you remain the most brilliant writer of
the International. But this reading confirms my belief that
you lack one quality, the one most necessary to a leader:
firmness of your political ideas.

"Today you magnanimously offer the PCI leadership a
peaceful haven 'within the ranks of the International
majority' where you yourself ingloriously found refuge, after
a few passing impulses of resistance to Pablo's revisionist
impulses. Pardon us for not following you on this path
because in our view the International will not be built by
maneuvering and especially not by your pitiful maneuvers."
"Comrade Ernest Germain, renounce diversionary
maneuvers, renounce your puerile and irresponsible double-
crossing game, put forward and defend your ideas as we
ourselves defend them."

translated from Spartacist (edition frangaise) No. 7,

autumn 1974

It is not hard to imagine the bitterness of these comrades,
who were being read out of the International, when the
erudite "leader" Mandel collapsed at the slightest pressure.
But the harm which befell them because of his perfidy does
not compare to the crime perpetrated against the Chinese
Trotskyists then being held in the jails of Mao Tse-tung's
Stalinist regime. This horror story is documented in a letter
by Peng Shu-tse, head of the Chinese section of the FI, to
American Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon in December
1953. Peng was first shocked to learn, some time after
arriving in Europe, that Pablo considered Mao's party
centrist and claimed Mao had absorbed the central theses

of the Trotskyist theory of permanent revolution. Since
Peng had been forced to flee China under the blows of
Stalinist repression, this was a little hard to stomach.

So, too, was Pablo's resolution on China adopted by the
International Executive Committee (lEC) in June 1952.
"The worst thing is," wrote Peng, "that nobody can find a
perspective for the Chinese Trotskyists in this resolution."
its supporters, he reported, called for dissolving the
Chinese section in order to join the Communist Party. But
the real shock came when he reported to a November 1952
I EC plenum on the brutal repression of the Chinese
Trotskyists by Mao. Pablo replied that the massacre was
not a deliberate action but a mistake and an exception. In
May 1953 Peng submitted to the lEC an international
appeal for aid from the Chinese Trotskyists and an open
letter to the Mao regime protesting the killings and jailings.
Pablo agreed to publish the former, but then suppressed it.

As to the open letter, Germain (by now Pablo's flunkey)
informed Peng — who was a member of the lEC, and of the
International Secretariat until Pablo purged him— that it
should have expressed total support of the Maoist regime,
praising its revolutionary achievements, and only then
mentioned the facts of the persecution. Because Peng
opposed the Peking regime as Stalinist, Mandel/Germain
denounced him as a "hopeless sectarian" and refused to
circulate the open letter to the International. The Chinese
Trotskyists, said the revisionist Germain, were "refugees
from a revolution"!

As if it were not enough to whitewash the Maoist
repression — praising the Stalinist regime as revolutionary,

continued on page 19

C.F.D.T.

Sit down strike at Citroen auto plant during May 1968. Whiie 10 million workers were out on strike, Mandel called
for "anti-capitalist structural reforms."

6

SPARTACIST

''Radical Egalita
A Post Mortem

During the heyday of the New Left a generation of
Western radicals came to politically embrace Stalinism in
its "Third World" variants in large part because Cuba and
China appeared to these impressionistic petty-bourgeois
idealists to be egalitarian societies in struggle, unlike the
seemingly complacent, stodgy, bureaucratized Soviet
Union. For the last decade in the U.S. political identifica-
tion with what could be called "Third World" Stalinist
egalitarianism has been a dominant tendency in main-
stream petty-bourgeois radicalism.

New Leftism first coalesced with "Third World"
Stalinism over the Cuban revolution during the mid-
1960's. in marked contrast to their Russian patrons the
Cuban leadership appeared to be genuinely committed to
humanistic and populist ideals, seemingly determined not
to give up their old spartan guerrilla values or their vision
of spreading the revolution throughout Latin America by
fomenting "armed struggle." Contrary to the New Left
illusions, the Cuban leaders were at bottom Khrushchevs in
khaki. After their budding "detente" with Yankee
imperialism was abruptly terminated by Washington and
their cordial relations with the Kremlin estranged follow-
ing what was regarded as a Soviet retreat over the 1962
missile crisis, the Cuban leaders had nothing to lose by
adopting a militant posture.

What especially captivated the New Left was how
Ernesto "Che" Guevara eloquently preached the need to
combine "building socialism" with creating "socialist
man." To New Leftists Guevara seemed to be speaking
their language when he advocated a struggle to end
alienated labor in Cuba that would start by replacing all
material incentives with moral incentives. Guevara seemed
to integrate two distinct New Left currents: regarding the
"wretched of the earth" in the "Third World" as the sole
revolutionary vanguard (Frantz Fanon), and viewing the
question of "personal liberation" as a necessary but
neglected goal of Marxist socialism (Herbert Marcuse).

Although the much-touted "radical" policies adopted by
Castro produced a series of economic disasters instead of
"socialist man" and were later scrapped in favor of a return
to more orthodox Soviet-model methods, the New Left in
the meantime had its attention diverted to China, then in
the throes of the so-called "Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution." Starry-eyed radicals in the West took as good
coin the Maoist demagogy about struggling to eliminate
bureaucratism and privilege and to create in China a
society modeled after the Paris Commune. In reality an
intra-bureaucratic power struggle launched by Mao only to
oust his principle rivals in the regime and to whip the
apparatus into line, the Cultural Revolution' was idealized
by many Leftists as a titanic campaign to institute
"participatory democracy" for one fourth of the human
race.

Whereas Guevara's specific economic (as opposed to his
high-falutin' social) ideas advocated during the Cuban
"Great Debate" had relatively little impact on the New

ian" Stalinism:

Ernesto "Che" Guevara.

Left, the Chinese Cultural Revolution made questions of
economic policy, such as moral versus material incentives,
a real issue among vicarious "radical" Stalinists. While
Guevara had regarded material incentives as perhaps
legitimate for "building socialism" Soviet-style but a fetter
on creating "socialist man," Mao claimed that material
incentives and wage differentials were a mortal threat to the
very existence of "socialism" in China. Not only those who
joined Maoist cadre organizations after the demise of the
New Left but also those soft "Third World" enthusiasts
who remained organizationally unaffiliated accepted the
incredibly idealist Maoist dogma that "revisionists"
(defined as anyone in the Chinese bureaucracy who
opposed Mao) could restore capitalism in China simply
through gradually expanding "bourgeois right" (material
incentives and the like), i.e., a peaceful and possibly even
surreptitious counterrevolution.

But history hasn't been kind to those who seek to glorify
"Third World" Stalinist egalitarianism. If the economic
policies of the Castro regime haven't caused significant
disillusionment in the New Left radical milieu, the
seemingly kaleidoscopic policy shifts associated with the
revolving-door purges in People's China since the death of
Mao certainly have. In October of 1976 the most
prominent representatives of "radical" Maoism (Chiang

SUMMER 1978

7

Ching, Yao Wen-yuan, Wang Huhg-wen, Chang Chun-
chiao) were suddenly purged and henceforth viHfied as a
high-living, double-dealing "Gang of Four" who spouted
rhetoric about "restricting bourgeois right" only to conceal
their allegedly nefarious schemes to restore a new
bourgeoisie to power in China. Claiming the mantle of
Maoism, the new regime headed by Hua Kuo-feng and
Teng Hsiao-ping has promised to rectify the voluntarist
idiocies attributed to the "Gang of Four" and to adopt
more "pragmatic" economic policies, which include
replacing moral incentives with material incentives and
raising wages for the first time in 16 years. Thus, a recent
issue of Peking Review ( 1 7 February) prominently featured
on its front page a slogan which for years- had been
denounced by the "radical" Maoists as the epitome of
Brezhnevite "revisionism": "To Each According to His
Work: Socialist Principle of Distribution."

While Castro's abandonment of Guevarist-inspired
economic policies produced no ripples among New Left
circles, the purge of the most prominent self-proclaimed
Maoist "egalitarians" proved to be a political bombshell in
the camp of Maoists and pro-Peking "progressives"
abroad. It was soon followed by an official campaign
repudiating those policies and rhetoric that for a decade
had been associated with"ra(^icar Maoism. In the U.S. the
question of material incentives versus "restricting bour-
geois right" entered into the clique fight which recently
ripped apart the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP),
once the largest pro-Peking organization in this country.
To the extent that the RCP clique fight had a programmat-
ic expression, the rival "headquarters" — the inveterate
New Leftists around the "Chairman" Bob Avakian and the
more orthodox Stalinists following Mickey Jarvis —
clashed over the question' of whether or not the new
leadership in Peking was leading China down the
"capitalist road." In his main "summing-up" of the fight
Avakian directed his "main blow" at Teng's "Twenty
Points," an economic policy platform that proposed
granting wage increases and reinstituting material
incentives.

Apart from those few dogged spirits who continue the
search for "socialist man" among the peasantry of tiny
Albania, New Left radicals have been left without any
Stalinist-ruled state to idealize as an egalitarian society.
Even Vietnam, that "socialist fatherland" for "Third
World" enthusiasts who wanted to wish away the Sino-
Soviet split, has been a "God That Failed" for many New
Left leftovers. While Ho once was glorified as a gentle
philosopher-poet concerned with instilling humanistic
values in his people even under conditions of war and
destruction, his heirs in Hanoi are today locked in a sordid
nationalist war with their "comrades" in Phnom Penh, who
are denounced as marauding rapists and cannibals. But
"poor little Cambodia" isn't likely to become a New Left
favorite. If wage differentials have been eliminated in
"Democratic Kampuchea," it is only because the rabidly
xenophobic and primitivist Cambodian Stalinist regime
has actually abolished wages and even currency itself —
which under conditions of material scarcity can only result
in militarization of labor and enormous economic
hardships for the toiling masses.

Thus, as a significant New Left-derived political
tendency identification with "radical" Stalinist egalitarian-
ism has had its day. But the issues which nurtured this

tendency are very much alive. Especially now, considerable
attention has been generated by the new so-called
"pragmatic" policies of the Hua/Teng regime. But in
denouncing how the "radical" Maoists misused moral
incentives and in "rehabilitating" material incentives the
present Peking regime by no means has repudiated moral
incentives as such. Regardless of which clique rules in the
Forbidden City, the Chinese Stalinist bureaucracy, as long
as it remains saddled by the enormous contradiction
between its material backwardness and its Great Power
aspirations, must continue to resort to utopian-voluntarist
methods — and to rationalize their economic policies with
phony egalitarian rhetoric. It is thus timely to consider how
the questions of material incentives and wage differentials
have been obfuscated and distorted by Stalinist ideologues,
both of the orthodox Moscow school and the sundry self-
styled "radical egalitarians," ranging from Guevara to
Mao.

Stalinist Idealism a la "Che"

"Che" Guevara was lionized by the New Left as the most
articulate of the Cuban leaders who were growing
increasingly critical of the guidance provided by the
"socialist beacon" in Moscow. A series of domestic
economic failures in the early 1960's convinced Guevara
that Soviet-model planning principles couldn't be success-
fully imposed upon the plantation monoculture of Cuba.
Moreover, many of the top leaders in the Cuban regime
regarded the Soviet role during the Missile Crisis of 1962 as
a retreat which left Cuba even more isolated than before.

In the course of the so-called "Great Debate" over
economic and developmental policies which took place in
Cuba during 1963-66 Guevara stressed what he called
"the two pillars of socialist construction: the formation of
the new human being and the development of technology."
If Cuba were to achieve genuine socialism, argued
Guevara, then two interrelated tasks had to be simultane-
ously tackled at once. First, commodity production in
Cuba had to be completely eliminated through full
collectivization, super-centralized planning and financing
and the eradication of material incentives. Second, creating
a self-sacrificing, frugal and fully-socialized "New Man"
required replacing material with moral incentives and
instituting campaigns encouraging unpaid voluntary labor.

While Guevara was undoubtedly fervent in his
egalitarian convictions, the fundamental concepts he
formulated and defended during the "Great Debate"
remained fully within the ideological domain of Stalinism.
At no time did Guevara question the total political
disenfranchisement of the Cuban masses or the commit-
ment of the Castro clique to the reactionary-utopian
Stalinist dogma of "building socialism in one country" — in
this case a tiny island only ninety miles from the shores of
the foremost imperialist colossus. Guevara's political
worldview was fundamentally defined by his identification
with the rule of a Stalinist bureaucratic caste that views as a
hostile act demands by the workers for a higher living
standard or for some say in decision making. If he sounded
more militant and egalitarian than the Kremlin bureau-
crats (and their loyal lackeys in Cuba), it was mainly because
Guevara, perhaps even more so than Fidel Castro, iden-
tified with the military — i.e., the guerrillas in power. Un-
like the party and administrative apparatuses, the military

continued on next page

8

SPARTACIST

Egalitarianism...

command was that part of the Cuban Stalinist bureaucracy
least directly involved with implementing economic
policies. Guevara was guided by a conception that
"socialist" society should be built not through appealing to
supposedly base material interests but by exhorting the
masses to sacrifice, just as the guerrillas had only been
victorious through enormous self-sacrifice and revolu-
tionary idealism.

What defined Guevara as fundamentally an idealist
Stalinist is the fact that he sought to surmount the
insurmountable obstacles to "building socialism" in
economically backward Cuba through utopian-voluntarist
means. In his well-known 1965 essay, "Man and Socialism
in Cuba," Guevara explicitly links the primacy of moral
over material incentives to the problems of how to rapidly
industrialize underdeveloped Cuba in a capitalist interna-
tional environment:

"Underdevelopment and the customary flight of capital to
'civilized' countries make impossible a rapid change without
sacrifices. There still remains a long stretch to be covered in
the building of the economic base, and the temptation to
follow the beaten paths of material interest as the lever of
speedy development is very great

"Pursuing the chimera of achieving socialism with the aid of
the blunted weapons left to us by capitalism (the commodity
as the economic cell, profitability, and individual material
interest as levers, etc.), it is possible to come to a blind

alley Meanwhile, the adapted economic base has

undermined the development of consciousness. To build
communism, a new man must be created simultaneously with
the material base."

— reproduced in Bertram Silverman, Man and
Socialism in Cuba: The Great Debate (1971)
Thus, consciously rejecting an internationalist (i.e.,
Leninist-Trotskyist) perspective of revolution, Guevara
advocated "sacrifices" by the laboring masses as the only
viable alternative to Soviet-style technocratic methods.

It is thus quite logical that for Guevara the principal
obstacle to "building socialism" in Cuba was the continua-
tion of individualistic attitudes and values among the
masses, in particular material interest as the prime
motivation for labor. For example, in an interview held in
1963 Guevara declared:

"1 am not interested in dry economic socialism. We are
fighting against poverty, but we are also fighting against
alienation. One of the fundamental objectives of Marxism is
to remove interest, the factor of individual interest, and gain
from men's psychological motivations. Marx was preoccu-
pied both with economic factors and with their repercussions
on the spirit. If communism isn't interested in this, too, it
may be a method of distributing goods, but it will never be a
revolutionary way of life."

— quoted in Silverman, introduction to Man and
Socialism in Cuba.

While attractive to the radical iconoclasm of the early
New Left, this political worldview is profoundly anti-
Marxist. The counterposition of individual material
interest to an abstract concept of social collectivity is a
bourgeois ideological prejudice. In one of his earliest
writings as a socialist Marx explicitly attacked setting the
interests of society above the well-being of its individual
members:

"Above all we must avoid postulating 'society' again as an
abstraction vis-a-vis the individual. The individual is the
social being. His manifestations of life — even if they may not

appear in the direct form of communal manifestations of life
carried out in association with others — are therefore an
expression and confirmation of social life." [emphasis in
original]

— "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,"
in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,
Collected Works (1975) Vol. Ill, p. 299
Engels was even more explicit about the individualist
values of communist society. In what became the first draft
of the Communist Manifesto he wrote:

"Question 2: What is the aim of the Communists!
"Answer: To organise society in such a way that every
member of it can develop and use all his capabilities and
powers in complete freedom and without thereby infringing
the basic conditions of this society."

— "Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith,"
in Marx and Engels, Collected Works (\916)
Vol. VI, p. 96

Needless to say, Marxists understand that in the course
of the epochal struggle to overthrow world capitalism the
cadres of the revolutionary vanguard must be prepared to
sacrifice their individual interests and sometimes even their
lives. In a period of revolutionary crises the working masses
will also make great sacrifices. But in mass struggles such
sacrifices are made for the purpose of securing better
material conditions in the near future. It is profoundly anti-
Marxist to transform the need for the vanguard and the
masses to make sacrifices in the struggle to overthrow
capitalism into a doctrinal rejection of the materialist and
individualist aims that are a component part of the
communist worldview.

Just as Guevara counterposed individual interest to the
ideal of an egalitarian-collectivist society, so he also tended
to simply identify individual selfishness with bourgeois
ideology. But Marxists understand .that bourgeois ideology
is not and never has been the cult of unbridled selfishness.
Only the most vulgar bourgeois ideologists of the ilk of Ayn
Rand would venture to make such a claim.

Nationalism and religion, often in concert, have played
an enormous role in conditioning the laboring masses to
submit to bourgeois authority in the factory and society in
general. For example, Methodism was the main ideological
force in the transformation of the independent English
artisan class of the eighteenth century into a disciplined
factory proletariat. Early nineteenth century British mill
owners were very much aware of the importance of moral
(i.e., religious) incentives in exploiting "their" laborers.
One leading ideologue of the British industrial revolution,
Andrew Ure, made the following typical observation in his
1835 work. Philosophy of Manufactures:

"It is, therefore, excessively the interest of every millowner to
organize his moral machinery on equally sound principles
with his mechanical, for otherwise he will never command
the steady hands, watchful eyes, and prompt co-operation,

essential to the excellence of product There is, in fact, no

case to which the Gospel truth, 'Godliness is great gain,' is
rriore applicable than to the administration of an extensive
factory."

— quoted in E.P. Thompson, TTie Making of the
English Working Class (1963)

It was Guevara's Stalinist political outlook which limited
him to his superficial and false view of bourgeois ideology
as simply pure individualism. Guevara cannot consider
nationalism as a bourgeois ideology precisely because of
his own central ideological commitment to "socialist
nation building." And Guevara's subjectivist concept of

SUMMER 1978

9

how to liberate the "socialist man" within every Cuban
citizen has a certain ideological resemblance to the
Christian doctrine that "the Kingdom of Heaven is within."

Subjectivist Re-Definition of Alienation

What most attracted the New Left to Guevara's
egalitarian concepts was his exhortation about ending
alienated labor as a vital part of the struggle to "build
socialism" in Cuba. Eliminating alienated labor would, in
turn, contribute to the interrelated task of creating the new
"socialist man." In "Man and Socialism in Cuba" Guevara
defined unalienated labor in the following terms:

"In order for it to develop in culture, work must acquire a
ne^y condition; man as commodity ceases to exist, and a
system is established that grants a quota for the fulfillment of
social duty. The means of production belong to society, and
the machine is only the front line where duty is performed.
Man begins to free his thought from the bothersome fact that
presupposed the need to satisfy his animal needs by working.
He begins to see himself portrayed in his work and to
understand its human magnitude through the created object,
through the work carried out. This no longer involves leaving
a part of his being in the form of labor power sold, which no
longer belongs to him; rather it signifies an emanation from
himself, a contribution to the life of society in which he is
reflected, the fulfillment of his social duty."

In other words, through institutionalized measures that
would encourage and reward performing "social duty"
(e.g., voluntary unpaid labor) the individual Cuban worker
would begin to identify his work with the larger socialist
cause and, to that extent, his labor would cease to be
alienated. Thus, for Guevara alienated labor \s a subjective
phenomenon, like individual interest, that can be trans-
formed through successfully instilling new collectivist
values among the working masses.

Such a concept of alienated labor, however, has nothing
in common with Marxism. As understood in the Marxist
sense, alienated labor is not fundamentally determined by
the subjective attitude of the worker towards his work —
whether he hates or likes his job, or whether he begins to get
satisfaction from working to "build socialism" regardless
of how he feels about his particular job. For Marxists
alienated labor is not subjectively but rather objectively
and historically determined.

Marx defined unalienated labor in the following precise
terms in the Grundrisse:

"The labor concerned with material production can only
have this [unalienated] character if ( I ) it is of a social nature,
(2) it has a scientific character and at the same time is general
work, i.e., if it ceases to be human effort as a definite, trained
natural force, gives up its purely natural, primitive aspects
and becomes the activity of a subject controlling all the forces
of nature in the production process." [emphasis added]

Thus, for Marx alienated labor is bound up with an
historically evolved division of labor in society wherein the
individual workers who are involved in material produc-
tion are denied mastery over the production process. This
given division of labor in turn derives from the inadequate
development of productivity and particularly the low
cultural level of the masses. Labor ceases to be alienated
only when "general work" has a thoroughly scientific
character, i.e., when objective conditions enable the
producer to fully control "all the forces of nature in the
production process." Social production will continue to be
marked by alienated labor as long as the low level of

productivity imposes a division of labor upon the
individual producers.

In contrast to Guevarist idealism, Marxists understand
that there are definite and manifold material preconditions
which must be socially achieved before all producers in
society are able to control "all the forces of nature in the
production process." Cutting sugar cane or manning an
assembly line in Stalinist-ruled Cuba can never be
unalienated labor, no matter how socialist-minded and
self-sacrificing the workers might be. Ending alienated
labor for the mass of producers is possible only in a gen-
uinely socialist society, the product of the transition peri-
od (the dictatorship of the proletariat) which has achieved
a multiple increase in labor productivity, an enormous
raising of the general cultural level of the population and
the continual expansion of individual free time. In
contrast, Guevara adopted the classically Stalinist position
that falsely identifies the dictatorship of the proletariat, the
transitional epoch between capitalism and socialism when
"classes still remain and will remain' (Lenin), with
socialism, the lower phase of communist society which
presupposes "an end to all class differences and class
antagonisms" (Engels). Thus, in arguing that "building
socialism" in Cuba required the elimination of material
incentives Guevara explicitly rejected those sections of
Marx's Critique of the Got ha Program which unam-
biguously stated that during the transitional epoch (the
dictatorship of the proletariat) "bourgeois right" manifest-
ed in income differentials would continue to exist.

Idealizing the Cuban Bureaucracy

Although New Left radicals were mainly enamoured of
Guevara's visions of the "New Man" freed from alienated
labor, the "Great Debate" in Cuba actually centered on far
more pragmatic issues. Guevara linked his abstract
exhortations for raising mass consciousness and ending
alienated labor with a series of proposals aiming at total
industrial/financial centralization in Cuba (an economic
continued on next page

Prensa Latina

New Leftist volunteers from tfie U.S. "build socialism"
by cutting sugar cane in Castro's Cuba, 1970.

10

SPARTACIST

Egalitarianism...

scheme that ran counter to the New Left fetish of
decentraHzation). During the "Great Debate" Guevara
advocated administering Cuba as if the country were a
single extensive factory.

Underlying Guevara's ultra-centralism was his evident
belief that at every level the Cuban administrative
personnel would carry out their production quotas in the
most cost-efficient, conscientious manner, i.e., that the
Cuban bureaucracy had sufficient socialist consciousness
so as not to require strict financial controls. His Soviet-
model opponents, principally the veteran Moscow-line
Stalinist Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, argued that unless
enterprises were financially self-sufficient (i.e., expected to
normally make a bookkeeping "profit"), managers would
tend to squander resources. Thus, the "Great Debate"
represented an intrabureaucratic tug-of-war between
Guevara the idealizer of the Cuban guerrillas in power and
the more "pragmatic" Stalinists around Rodriguez, who
argued for a more "realistic" accommodation to manageri-
al parasitism.

In such intrabureaucratic conflicts over plannings
methods revolutionary Marxists cannot take sides, since a
rational and egalitarian economic policy is not possible as
long as political power is monopolized by a privileged
bureaucratic caste. However, among the prominent
contributors to the "Great Debate" was none other than
Ernest Mandel, erudite Pabloist revisionist and today
prominent leader of the fake-Trotskyist United Secretariat
of tl^e Fourth International (USec). While Cuba did
present the unique phenomenon of a bureaucratically
deformed workers state issuing out of the victory of a non-
Stalinist petty-bourgeois nationalist guerrill;\ formation
(the July 26 Movement), Mandel & Co. claimed that
"Fidel" and "Che" were genuine Marxist-Leninists and
that the supposedly insignificant bureaucratic deforma-
tions which existed in the Havana regime did not require a
political revolution led by a Trotskyist party but could be
rectified through oh-so-comradely criticism and
suggestions.

While the USec aggressively assumed the role of
publicity agents for the Cuban regime under the rubric of
"defending the Cuban revolution," Mandel traveled to
Havana to intervene in the "Great Debate." His article,
"Mercantile Categories in the Period of Transition," ap-
peared in the January 1964 issue of Nuestra Indus tria. the
journal of Guevara's Ministry of Industry. Mandel sought
to become a theoretical braintruster for what he viewed as
the left-leaning wing of the Cuban "leadership" around
Guevara. Needless to say, in this article (as well as all his
other pro-Castro accolades then and since) Mandel was
mum about his "Trotskyist" affiliation and formal espousal
of the program of the Fourth International; he was well
aware of the fact that one of the first acts of the Castro
regime was the suppression of the ostensibly Trotskyist
movement in Cuba (the Posadista organization), which
included the destruction of the printing plates for a Spanish
translation of Trotsky's Permanent Revolution.

Disingenuously presenting himself as merely an
academic fellow traveler of world Stalinism commenting
on the problems faced by the "workers states" in the

transition to "socialism," Mandel in this article throws his
support behind Guevara in the issues in dispute. On the
question of enterprise autonomy, for instance, Mandel
backs Guevara's supercentralism:

"The more underdeveloped a country's economy, the fewer
able, experienced, and truly socialist technical cadres it will
have, and the wiser it is, in our opinion, to reserve decision-
making power over the more important investments and
financial matters to the central authorities."

-reproduced in Silverman, Man and Socialism in
Cuba

Having thus given the Cuban Stalinist "central authori-
ties" a carte blanche, Mandel must take political responsi-
bility for the disastrous results of Castro's economic
policies. What' Guevara's super-"centralist" schemes
actually involved was the dismantling of the system of
charges between state-owned enterprises and between
enterprises and the ministries as the means of financial
control and accountability. Thus, the Cuban economic
system was stripped of any mechanism for determining
rational resource allocation and utilization. In 1966 Castro
drastically reduced the power and functions of the Central
Planning Board and personally assumed decision-making
formerly handled by the planners. Completely neglecting
the gathering of statistical data, Castro discarded the
medium-range plan, launching in its place a series of
unrelated "mini" and "special" plans. As a result capital
and human resources were grossly misused and
squandered.

Years later, after Castro returned to orthodox Soviet-
model planning systems, the Guevarist schemes were
criticized as idealist. At the first-ever congress of the Cuban
Communist Party held in 1976 Castro made the following
very dry criticism of Guevara's policies:

"The fact is that a single management system of the entire
economy did not exist and, under the circumstances, we took

the less correct decision — to invent a new procedure

"By the end of 1965, the Ministry of Finance had already
been dissolved and the National Bank restructured. The last
budget adopted was that of 1 967, but its implementation was
not controlled because, since the second quarter of that year,

charges and payments were no longer being made

"In 1968, the connection between salaries and output sales
was severed. Work-hour schedules on the basis of conscious-
ness and renunciation of pay for extra hours worked were
stimulated, in 1967 interest on loans and taxes collected from
farmers was abolished

"When it might have seemed as though we were drawing
nearer to communist forms of production and distribution,
we were actually pulling away from the correct methods for
the previous construction of socialism."
— Granma, 4 July 1976
While his philosophical contributions were definitively
idealist and his economic schemes proved disastrous,
Guevara at the same time was a rare figure in the history of
world Stalinism inasmuch as he evidently believed in the
egalitarian principles that he articulated. Guevara was
manifestly a man of considerable political integrity and
personal courage who lived and was prepared to die for his
beliefs. It has been claimed— and it may indeed be tru^—
that Guevara left Cuba to undertake guerrilla war in Latin
America at least in part because he was repelled by the
small-mindedness, philistinism and venality of the new bu-
reaucratic caste under Castro.

Maoist Mystification of Bourgeois Right

While ideologically an inveterate Stalinist to the end,
Guevara was different in this respect from the Chinese

SUMMER 1978

11

'^radical egalitarians" who rose to power and prominence
during the Cultural Revolution. In contrast to Guevara,
the Maoist sycophants, like their mentor, were totally
cynical and demagogic in their professions of egalitarian
policies. Mao was a bonapartist maneuverer whose
endlessly quoted, quasi-delphic utterances could be (and
have been) used to justify the most contradictory and even
counterposed policies. For her part Chiang Ching
preached puritanism and austerity to the Chinese masses,
while enjoying to the full a luxuriant lifestyle that would be ,
fitting for a Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis or a Princess
Grace of Monaco. From all evidence the Maoist "radicals"
were exceptionally corrupt and vicious cliquists, even by
the Byzantine standards of the Forbidden City.

All the "radical" Maoist rhetoric about "restricting
bourgeois right" and "putting politics in command" that
captured the imagination of the New Left was nothing
more than demagogy which the Chinese leaders cynically
used to rationalize what in reality were intrabureaucratic
and internecine dogfights. It all originated with the rupture
between the USSR and China in 1960, when the Chinese
Stalinist leadership felt compelled to concoct an incredibly
idealist and vulgar "theory" to explain how "socialist"
Russia had suddenly become "revisionist." According to

Der Spiegel

Big-Character poster vilifies "Gang of Four" as two-
faced "capitalist readers" bent on spreading anarchy
and economic chaos.

Mao and his then "comrade-in-arms" Liu Shao-chi (the
head of state and number two man in the party hierarchy),
under "socialism" a "two-line struggle" continues between
the genuine revolutionaries and the "revisionists" whose
policies, if implemented, would lead inevitably to the
restoration of capitalism. Thus, with the passing of Stalin,
the "revisionist" Khrushchev seized power in a palace coup
and proceeded over the next several years to open the
floodgates to all the crypto-"capitalist readers" who had
been secretly harboring restorationist ideas but were afraid
to come out into the open. Needless to say, this "theory"
neglected to explain why Mao only got Khrushchev's
number after the Sino-Soviet rupture.

It was during the Cultural Revolution, however, that this
fairy tale was elaborated into the doctrine of "capitalist
roadism." Whereas Stalin claimed that all his real or
potential enemies in the bureaucracy were agents of Wall
Street or Hitler, Mao "deepened" this method, accusing his
rivals within the Chinese bureaucracy of having bourgeois
ideas, i.e. of being "capitalist roaders." In a bid to restore
his authority that had been damaged after the fiasco of the
"Great Leap Forward" Mao launched the Cultural
Revolution by branding Liu Shao-chi "China's Khrush-
chev" and calling for the purge of his followers who were
allegedly leading China down the "capitalist road."

Maoist rhetoric about "restricting bourgeois right"
derived from the need to explain just how the economic
policies pursued by Liu Shao-chi, Teng Hsiao-ping and
Peng Chen— restoration of private peasant plots and
return to a free market in agricultural produce, both
designed to regain the peasants' confidence that had been
lost through the "Great Leap" disaster — could lead to the
restoration of capitalism. Thus, Mao and his "closest-
comrade-in-arms" Marshal Lin Piao charged Liu and Teng
with advocating the primacy of material incentives and
forgetting about the "class struggle." By "putting produc-
tion in command" Liu and Teng were said to have been
conspiring to put a new bourgeoisie in power.

TJiat such charges were sheer demagogy was revealed
most starkly when Lin Piao, named in the Chinese
constitution as Mao's heir designate, fell out of favor in the
Forbidden City in 1971. After Lin's plane reportedly fell
out of the sky over Mongolia the deceased former "closest-
comrade-in-arms" of the Chairman was denounced as "a
fanatical advocate of 'material incentives'." On the
contrary, Lin in fact had been a champion of Maoist
voluntarism. During the Lin Piao period ( 1 969-7 1 ) Chinese
economic policies resembled those of the "Great Leap,"
although not on the same scale. Private peasant plots were
curtailed and labor was mobilized not through use of
material incentives but through direct state coercion.

The major Maoist tract branding support for material
incentives as "capitalist roadism" is the article, "On the
Social Basis of the Lin Piao Anti-Party Clique," penned by
Yao Wen-yuan, Mao's principal literary hatchet man (until
he got axed after the death of the Chairman). Here is the
nub of his argument:

"If we do not follow this course [restricting bourgeois right],
but call instead for the consolidation, extension and
strengthening of bourgeois right and that part of inequality it
entails, the inevitable result will be polarization, i.e.. a small
number of people will in the course of distribution acquire
increasing amounts of commodities and money through
continued on next page

12

SPARTACIST

Egalitarianism...

certain legal channels and numerous illegal ones; capitalist
ideas of amassing fortunes and craving for personal fame and
gain, stimulated by such 'material incentives,' will spread
unchecked; such phenomena as turning public property into
private property, speculation, graft and corruption, theft and
bribery will rise; the capitalist principle of the exchange of
commodities will make its way into political life and even
into Party life, undermine the socialist planned economy and
give rise to such acts of capitalist exploitation as the
conversion of commodities and money into capital and labor
power into a commodity; and there will be a change in the
nature of the system of ownership in certain departments and
units which follow the revisionist line; and instances of
oppression and exploitation of the labouring Jjeople will
once again occur."

—Peking Review, 7 March 1975

What Yao does here is a causal sleight-of-hand. For
Marx and Lenin "bourgeois right" had a precise and
dehmited meaning in terms of the transitional epoch. It
signified the continuation of differences in wages and
income during the period of the dictatorship of the
proletariat. But under the rubric of "bourgeois right" Yao
identifies widening wage differentials with the illicit
accumulation of capital, arguing that the first necessarily
and inexorably leads to the second. This is a specious
argument.

In a non-capitalist state such as the USSR or People's
Republic of China wage differentials result in different
levels of individual consumption, but not in personal
accumulation of the means of production. Even the often
extravagant incomes (legal and otherwise) received by the
Stalinist bigwigs are expended mainly on high living (e.g.,
Brezhnev's collection of foreign cars, Chiang Ching's
collection of foreign films). To be sure, in the USSR and
China instances occur when state administrators are
caught selling state property on the black market. But such
cases of individual officials going into business for
themselves are a marginal economic phenomenon (even in
Yugoslavia, where "market socialism" is most extensive);
stiff penalties (including capital punishment) serve to
discourage such "capitalist roadism."

Contrary to the scenario given by Yao, quantitative
changes in income distribution, important as they might be
in many ways, cannot affect the class character of the state
as long as the main means of production remain
nationalized. It would take a counterrevolution that
smashed the state apparatus and subsequently converted
the collectivized property back into privately owned
commodities to restore capitalism in the Soviet Union,
China or any of the other deformed workers states. Such a
fundamental overturn in property relations could not be
produced simply through the molecular economic pro-
cesses precipitated by widening income differentials.

However, what Yao and Mao were really concerned
about was not bureaucratic parasitism but workers'
demands for higher wages. Wages had remained frozen in
China since 1962, even though the 1956 wage code
stipulated that general raises were to be implemented every
other year. In his article Yao attributed all demands for
higher wages to the nefarious influence of Lin Piao:

"A principal member of the Lin Piao anti-Party clique also
wrote that 'the principle of to each according to his work and
of material benefit' was the 'decisive motive force' in

promoting production. On the face of it. they advocated
using money to 'stimulate' the workers, but actually they
wanted to widen without limit the differences in grade among
the workers in order to foster and buy over a small section of
•the working class, turn it into a privileged stratum which
betrays the proletarian dictatorship and the interests of the
proletariat, and split the unity of the working class.... Lin
Piao and company attached 'particular importance' to using
'wages' to lure 'young workers,' and their 'inducements-
official post, emolument, favour' were a sinister scheme.
This shows us by negative example that young workers, .
particularly those who have become cadres, must conscious-
ly reject the material inducements of the bourgeoisie and the
flattery offered them in various forms by the idea of
bourgeois right."

Thus, while claiming to stand for the "unity of the working
class," Yao actually sought to justify the suppression of all
'Wage demands by the Chinese workers.

A few months after Yao wrote this article the Maoist
regime demonstrated in practice itS" hostility to legitimate
wage demands by the workers. In the summer of 1975 a
citywide strike erupted in the major textile-producing
center of Hangchow, near Shanghai.' At first the regime
sent Wang Hung-wen, one of Yao's "radical" cronies and
later one of the hapless "Gang," to Hangchow to try to talk
the strikers back to work. When this failed, Teng Hsiao-
ping personally led a 10,000-strong PL A force into
Hangchow and smashed the strike. When confronted by
the long-denied economic demands and struggles of the
Chinese workers, all wings of the bureaucracy, from the
phony "egalitarians" to the "rehabiHtated revisionists,"
proved to be united in their commitment to preserving their
complete political stranglehold over the atomized
proletariat.

Unlike New Left radicals, the Chinese working class was
far from satisfied with a steady diet of egalitarian rhetoric.
If anything, the Cultural Revolution left the mass of
Chinese workers in an even worse economic situation than
before. In the name of combatting "capitalist roadism" the
Maoist regime has kept wages frozen; in 1973 the Chiang
Ching clique evidently put a stop to a move to advance
workers in the bottom five wage grades one rung higher.
Under this system the first grade provides a wage of 30 yuan
a m9nth and the top grade 100 yuan a month, a wage ratio
comparable to that in the USSR (Far Eastern Economic
Review, 27 January 1978).

However, the fundamentally inegalitarian nature of
income distribution in Mao's China is revealed not so much

^ CHINA'S THREE WAGE SCALES '

GRADE

RMB PER MONTH

0 20 10 60 80 100 200 300 <»00 500

1 1 J 1 1 1 ,. 1 1 ; 1 HMR

TECHNICAL

]

" — ^::^m

ADMINISTRATIVE

a

WORKER

SUMMER 1978

13

by wage differences among the workers as by the income
differentials between the working class and the
administrative/technical elite. In the wage system copied
from the USSR by Mao in 1956 (and retained to this day)
the highest technical grade receives 340 yuan a month and
the top administrative grade 450 yuan a month. In Canton
in 1974 the lowest grade clerical worker received only 35
yuan a month while the head of his or her bureau received
an official salary of between 200 and 210 yuan a month— a
ratio of about six-to-one ( Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv, No.
4, 1976).

Furthermore, the material privileges which the Chinese
administrative elite enjoys also include various "fringe
benefits." For manual workers sick leave up to one month
is given with a ten percent reduction in pay; for longer
periods pay is docked at a rate up to 50 percent. But
administrators are granted up to three months sick leave
with no loss in pay, while longer absences are given with
only a 10-30 percent reduction in pay (Far Eastern
Economic Review, 28 January 1978). And these are only
the official wage and benefit scales. Since the Chinese
proletariat has no institutionalized control over the
government apparatus, Chinese enterprise managers,
heads of bureaus, military commanders and a whole host of
other well-placed bureaucrats can supplement their official
incomes by all kinds of petty corruption and parasitism, for
example using state vehicles for personal errands. Such
inegalitarian wage scales and bureaucratic parasitism and
mismanagement are inevitable as long as the governmental
administration is not responsible to the democratic
organizations of the working class, i.e., until genuine soviet
democracy is established through a proletarian political
revolution that topples the Chinese Stalinist bureaucracy.

"Great Disorder Under Heaven..."?

To rationalize the proposed re-introduction of material
incentives the new Hua/Teng leadership has made hiuch
ado about the supposed breakdown in labor discipline in
China's factories. This situation, like every other evil (real
or fabricated) that has befallen China, has been attributed
to the misdeeds of the nefarious "Gang of Four," who
allegedly were out to wreck the economy. Typical of the
tirades against the voluntarist idiocies supposedly promot-
ed by the "Gang" is the article, "The 'Gang of Four' Pushed
Anarchism," which reads in part:

"The 'gang of four' was not just opposing 'kuan. chia, vo'
[controlling anarchist tendencies, curbing capitalist tenden-
cies, suppressing the class enemies' sabotage] but was
opposing all rules and regulations. Chang Chun-chiao made
this clear when he said: 'It is necessary to set up enterprises

that have no rules and regulations' How can production

go on in a large enterprise without rules and regulations? This
is common knowledge. Was the 'gang of four' really ignorant
of this? Of course not. In spreading such nonsense as they
did, they aimed at throwing the national economy into chaos
il SO that they could blame others for it and seize power by
P taking advantage of the ensuing chaotic state of affairs."
Peking Review. 1 April 1977

The Western bourgeois press has generally bought the
official Peking line that labor morale and discipline in
China has gone to the dogs as a result of the policies of the
"Gang." For example, the Washington Post of 15 May
1977 ran an article entitled "Post-Mao Leaders Battle
'WPA Atmosphere' in Factories." Similarly, one of the

editors of the prestigious London Economist who recently
returned from a tour in China described a typical Chinese
factory in the following terms:

"Half the work force was not there at all, being better
occupied in the town burying the winter cabbages dumped in
already frost-nipped piles along the city's pavements. The
other half was gently ambling on with its job, English-style,
but was not adverse to stopping for a cigarette and a peer at
the inscrutable occidentals come to visit them. Work
discipline everywhere in our industrial plants was, to put it
kindly, relaxed . . ."

— Economist, 31 December 1977 ^

A widespread and serious deterioration , in labor
discipline is always a sign of political disaffection with, if
not opposition to, the state authorities. After the Soviet
invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, for example, the
normally industrious Prague factory workers began to take
very long coffee and lunch breaks, and productivity
plummeted as a result. It is certainly possible that in China
industrial workers have responded to the years of frozen
wages and feverish "ideological campaigns" that consumed
much of what little free time they had by deliberately
slacking off on their productivity. Over the past several
years at least, China has been plagued by labor unrest; so
volatile and violent have been the reported strikes and
protests since the death of Mao and the purge of the "Gang
of Four" that the army had to be sent to occupy several
provinces.

However, the accounts of the Hua regime and bourgeois
"China watchers" about how lackadaisical Chinese
workers have become cannot be taken at face value. It is
important to keep in mind that in their campaign to vilify
the "Gang of Four" the present Chinese rulers have a real
interest in exaggerating all the "crimes" supposedly
committed by the purged four. Moreover, Peking is no
doubt exaggerating the problem of labor discipline in order
to justify the proposed widening of pay differentials and
restoration of piece rates and bonuses — anti-egalitarian
measures that are sure to be unpopular with the Chinese
workers. For their part bourgeois journalists, who have no
interest in seeing labor productivity increased in China, are
predisposed to accepting the contention that the Maoist
"radicals" destroyed labor discipline, since they seek to
discredit the very idea that socialist consciousness can ever
be a positive factor in production.

It isn't now possible to ascertain the true state of labor
morale presently prevailing in China's factories. Even if the
official reports of high absenteeism and low labor
productivity were accurate, these examples are selected for
a tendentious purpose. It is also necessary to bear in mind
that in order to minimize unemployment, factories in
China (like those in the USSR) are kept overmanned by
capitalist standards. Thus, the impressionistic comparisons
with West European or Japanese enterprises which are
frequently made by foreigners who visit China are not very
meaningful.

In any case, changes in labor productivity on a national
scale are very difficult to measure. Even more so than the
Soviet Union, China is a closed society in which the
detailed, comprehensive statistics required to compute
labor productivity are not public information and may not
even exist at all. However, one can derive a rough indirect
index of labor productivity from statistics about industrial
continued on next page

14

SPARTACIST

Egalitarianism...

output. On the basis of statistics compiled by the Peking
regime the well-respected Far Eastern Economic Review
calculated that between 1969 (the end of the Cultural
Revolution) and 1973 industrial output in China increased
by 58 percent (Asia Yearbook, 1975). Such a significant
increase in output does not jibe with the scenarios of
widespread anarchy in factories across China that have
been promoted by the regime.

Differential Wages During the Transitional
Epoch

In their writings on moral versus material incentives and
"restricting bourgeois right" both the ideological spokes-
men of the current so-called "pragmatic" regime in Peking
and the "radical" Maoists confuse, in large part deliberate-
ly, three separate questions.
One is the question of wage
differentials as a mechanism for
allocating labor between dif-
ferent occupations, industries
and geographical regions. A
second and related question is
differential wage payments-
piece rates and bonuses — as a
means of securing labor disci-
pline and morale. And the third
is the relation between the
incomes of the administrative
hierarchy and those of the mass
of the workers.

Stalinist "egalitarians" like
Guevara and Yao attempt to
simply identify differential
wages with capitalist market
relations. All their talk about
"restricting bourgeois right"
and "moral not material incen-
tives" is a demagogic cover for
state coercion in the allocation
of labor. It is an elementary
proposition of Marxism —
explicitly stated in such key
works as Marx's Critique of the

Gotha Program, Engel's Ami- DUhring and Lenin's State
and Revolution — that during the transitional epoch (the
dictatorship of the proletariat) differential wages will
continue to exist. Income differentials continue to be
needed to allocate labor between different occupations,
industries and regions without having to resort to
administrative coercion. Given that material scarcity and
cultural attitudes inherited from bourgeois society do not
immediately disappear under the dictatorship of the
proletariat, many workers will not take the time and effort
required to acquire new skills without receiving a higher
income for doing so. Similarly, many workers will not take
particularly dangerous, arduous or unpleasant jobs
without receiving significantly higher than average wages.

In addition to such material incentives, a workers state
would also have recourse to moral incentives during the
transition period. A revolutionary regime, elected on the

basis of workers councils (Soviets), would have the moral
authority to reduce in general wage differentials. For
example, many urban youth could be induced to take jobs
in remote or backward rural areas on the basis of socialist
idealism rather than higher wages. In a workers state the
optimum wage structure, including the best mix of material
and moral incentives, would be determined through the
institutionalized mechanisms of workers democracy, in
particular, negotiations between the central labor ministry
and the trade unions.

In contrast to this socialist norm, in China, despite all the
"radical" Maoist demagogy about "restricting bourgeois
right," industrial workers cannot change jobs without
official approval — a degree of state coercion in the
allocation of labor that is reactionary even by the norms of
capitalism. Likewise, in the period since the Red Guards,
were smashed in 1968 millions of urban youth in China
have been dispersed throughout the countryside to perform

Der Spiegel

Commune in Kwangsi province: Maoist Utopian voluntarism is rooted in the
contradiction between the great material backwardness of the country and the
Great Power ambitions of its ruling bureaucratic caste.

back-breaking agricultural labor. Exhorted by the regime
to "learn from the peasantry," these youth went to the
countryside not on the basis of Maoist "moral incentives"
but as a result of (or under the threat oO state coercion,
which for the Red Guards who resisted the liquidation of
what they mistakenly believed were the egalitarian goals of
the Cultural Revolution meant brutal military force.

If the smashing of the disillusioned Red Guards and the
subsequent suppression of proposed wage increases for the
Chinese workers are considered victories in "restricting
bourgeois right," then pro-"Gang" Maoists like the
Avakianite RCP should love the methods of so-called
"socialist construction" imposed by the Pol Pot regime in
"Democratic Kampuchea." Why, the Maoist "mass
campaigns" to exorcise the evil Confucian spirit that was
embodied in Lin Piao pale in comparison with how the
ruling clique in Phnom Penh (whoever they are) cleaned

SUMMER 1978

15

out "bourgeois right" in Cambodia.

After consolidating power in the spring of 1975 the
Cambodian StaHnists emptied the capital city of Phnom
Penh at gunpoint (other cities and towns were depopulated
in a similar fashion as they fell to the Khmer Rouge). The
urban population — not just the war refugees but long-time
city dwellers, including the elderly and sick— were force-
marched into the countryside, where they were put to work
in rice production regardless of their previous occupation.
According to several Yugoslav journalists who toured
Cambodia last March (the first foreigners allowed to do so
since the Khmer Rouge came to power three years ago),
Cambodian workers are not permitted to leave their
assigned farming commune or even their production team,
and youths by the thousands have been impressed into so-
called "voluntary" mobile labor brigades (New York
Times, 24 March 1978).

Rather than using material incentives for particularly
back-breaking and noxious work the Cambodian regime
resorts to extensive child labor. In a recent very revealing
statement Cambodian President Khieu Samphan declared:
"Our children do not need toys which were formerly
imported at considerable cost. They are happy with driving
sparrows away from the crops, tending cattle and buffalo,
collecting natural fertilizer and helping to build dams and
digging ditches."

— quoted in London Times, 7 February 1978

As for the second question — differential wage payments
to impose labor discipline— Stalinist "pragmatists" like
Hua and Teng attempt to identify differential wages as a
means to allocate labor with differential wage payments as
a means of securing labor discipline and goading the
workers into greater productivity. Communists have a
fundamentally different attitude toward piece rates and
bonuses than toward occupational or sectoral wage
differences. Piece rate wages and bonuses for productivity
pit one worker against another and consequently have
always been fought by the labor movement under
capitalism. As Trotsky remarked about the retrogressive
character of the Russian Stakhariovite movement launched
in 1935, "Relations of this kind are farther from socialist
morals than the relations of the workers of a capitalist
factory, joined together as they are in a struggle against
exploitation" {Revolution Betrayed).

Stalinist "pragmatists" like Teng seek to justify their
anti-egalitarian economic policies by pointing out that
Lenin regarded piece rates as legitimate. It is true that
during the catastrophic economic collapse which accom-
panied the horribly destructive civil war in Russia, at a time
when most of the class-conscious workers had been
mobilized to the military fronts and their places in the
factories were taken by raw peasants drawn from the
backward countryside, Lenin advocated the introduction
of piece rates as a capitalist production technique which,
while odious, nevertheless was superior to the primitive
methods of "War Communism." However, with the civil
war behind, the Soviet Labor Code of 1922 provided for
M'ages to be negotiated between the trade unions and the
enterprise management. By 1928 piece rates covered only
34 percent of the industrial labor force (Margaret Dewar,
Labour Policy in the USSR, 1917-1928). It was during
Stalin's break-neck forced industrialization drive of the
I930's that piece rates were made nearly universal in the
USSR and with differentials far steeper than ever before.

Stakhanovism served to enormously widen income
differences within the Russian proletariat, crystallizing a
labor "aristocracy" that was despised by the mass of the
workers.

In a workers state socialist consciousness, integrally
bound up with soviet democracy, would act to ensure that
work is performed conscientiously. To be sure, even in a
healthy workers state there will be some loiterers and
shirkers. But such errant individuals who are willfully
negligent can best be dealt with through the organized
social pressure of their fellow workers; the few incorrigibly
ill-disciplined workers could be economically penalized
and, perhaps as a last resort, fired.

If the Stalinist "egalitarians" and "pragmatists" each
manipulate for their own purposes the separate but related
questions of wage differentials among the workers, they are
united in their common attempt to obfuscate the question
of income differences between the mass of workers and the
administrative hierarchy. All Stalinist ideologues discuss
the question of incentives in terms of the population in
general, making no distinction between the mass of
workers and the so-called "socialist intelligentsia" (the
bureaucrats). Orthodox Stalinist ideologues in the service
of Teng and Hua use the general principle, "From each
according to his work," to rationalize the relatively
extravagant incomes and "fringe benefits" enjoyed by the
administrative elite. Contrariwise, the Stalinist "egalitari-
ans" like Guevara and Yao seek to divert attention from the
bureaucracy's material privileges by belaboring the lack of
full socialist consciousness among the masses.

Neither the Stalinist "egalitarians" nor the "pragmatists"
have ever advocated the genuinely egalitarian principle
that, as a norm, the income of a socialist administrator
should not exceed the income of an average skilled worker.
In his seminal work State and Revolution Lenin presents
this as one of the basic economic principles of the
transitional society:

"To organize the whole economy on the lines of the postal
service so that the technicians, foremen and accountants, as
well as all officials, shall receive salaries no higher than 'a
workman's wage,' all under the control and leadership of the
armed proletariat — this is our immediate aim." [emphasis in
original]

Of course, such a programmatic norm is not always
immediately realizable. If a workers state remains isolated
and backward (as was the USSR in Lenin's time), then
bourgeois experts can be expected to try to flee to the
advanced capitalist countries, and all the more so if their
salaries were to be cut to correspond to the earnings of a
skilled manual worker. Thus in the USSR under Lenin
and Trotsky bourgeois specialists desperately needed by
the beleaguered regime, including foreigners, were paid
continued on next page

WOMEN AND REVOLUTION

published by the Women's Commission of the
Spartacist League

$2/4 issues

Make checks payable/mail to:
Spartacist Publishing Co., Box 1377, G.P.O.
New York, New York 10001

V y

16

SPARTACIST

Egalitarianism...

relatively high salaries. But for Lenin and Trotsky such
income differentials were an unfortunate necessity,
dictated by the delay of the revolution in the
advanced capitalist countries. Furthermore, at that time
bourgeois specialists in the employ of the Bolsheviks were
not given posts as responsible administrators but instead
only had advisory and purely technical roles.

In a workers state during the transitional epoch income
differentials between the mass of workers and the technical
specialists will persist for a period as a result of the lack of
uniform socialist consciousness conditioned by the
continuation of conditions of material scarcity. However,
in a workers state the responsible central administrative
hierarchy would be selected precisely on the basis of
demonstrated socialist consciousness; i.e., from among
those who offer their services to the regime out of
demonstrably unselfish motives. Thus, in a workers state
the income of a factory manager or head of an industrial
ministry would not be determined in the same way as the
salary of a coal miner or a doctor working in a remote rural
area, i.e. by the labor market.

Material incentives as a means to keep the administrative
personnel honest would be regarded as fundamentally
inappropriate in a workers state. Managers or other
specialists who are corrupt, incorrigibly negligent or
abusive would simply be removed from positions of
responsibility. In the institutional context of soviet
democracy the most effective mechanism for keeping
socialist administrators honest is workers control: the
authoritative consultative voice of workers at the point of
production. It is the workers under a particular administra-
tor who are best able to ensure that his work is performed
conscientiously.

In contrast, in the Sino-Soviet degenerated /deformed
workers states the economic parasitism of the administra-

tors has become institutionalized. Bureaucratic parasitism
has been at the heart of the seemingly interminable debates
over economic and financial decentralization, from the
"Great Debate" in Cuba to the rigidly controlled discussion
of "Libermanism" in the USSR.

But the continual shifts in the level of centralization in
the collectivized economies of the degenerated /deformed
workers states can never solve the problem of managerial
corruption and parasitism. Rational economic planning
and administration are fundamentally incompatible with
the monopolization of political power by a bureaucratic
caste. Soviet attempts to curb managerial parasitism and
inefficiency provide the most graphic case in point.

With the institution of the first Five Year Plan in 1928
managerial incomes were geared to over-fulfilling the
planned output. However, this single, crude index left a lot
of room for cheating on the part of the administrative
authorities. Thus. Soviet managers routinely understated
the real productive capacity of their plants so as to be given
a plan that could be easily fulfilled (and hopefully over-
fulfilled), while hoarding labor and raw materials and
willfully sacrificing assortment and quality so as to
maximize output. In 1965 the Brezhnev/ Kosygin regime
instituted an economic reform that was motivated by the
"principle": if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. A complex
system was instituted in the USSR which directly linked
managerial incomes to enterprise "profitability." But
instead of eliminating the bureaucratic evils of the
old system, the "Liberman" reforms simply perpetuated
them, while generating others. (For a detailed analysis of
the 1965 Soviet economic reforms see: "How Maoists
'Restore Capitalism' in the Soviet Union," in the Spartacus
Youth League pamphlet Why the USSR Is Not Capitalist.)

A revolutionary workers government would be able to
suppress administrative parasitism as a significant eco-
nomic phenomenon. It thus would be able to eliminate
those forms of financial decentralization now employed in
the Soviet bloc in a vain attempt to counter managerial

Der Spiegel

Steel mill In Anshan: producing 23 million tons of steel, as much as England. Official claim that labor discipline
collapsed under "Gang of Four" flies in the face of rise in China's industrial output.

SUMMER 1978

17

corruption and inefficiency. In a non-capitalist state
centralized economic planning takes on an unequivocably
socialist character only when the governing authorities
represent the rational, democratically determined interests
of the working people. Under a Stalinist regime greater
economic centralization does not necessarily possess any
such socialist virtues and may be largely formal. As
demonstrated by Mao's "Great Leap" debacle and Castro's
1 0 million ton sugar harvest fiasco, the megalomania of the
Stalinist rulers can be far more economically disruptive
and wasteful than increased competition between state
enterprises.

Not much remains of the aura of radical egalitarianism
surrounding the "Third World" Stalinist regimes, it has
been getting increasingly difficult for the New Left
apologists for the Chinese and Cuban regimes to claim that
these societies are somehow profoundly egalitarian. When
Castro's^Cuba and Mao's China have experimented with

making a leap out of commodity production, the result has
been increased state coercion of labor and rationing for
the masses followed by costly fiascos which fall hardest
on the shoulders of the workers and peasants. In this
respect the truly brutal primitivism of Pol Pot's "Demo-
cratic Kampuchea" is simply the most extreme expression
of Stalinist economic "egalitarianism."

Genuine economic egalitarianism is not possible as long
as political power is monopolized by a Stalinist ruling
oligarchy. The genuinely egalitarian use of moral incen-
tives requires a government with the moral authority
derived from the democratic participation of the working
masses expressed through soviet institutions. Wage labor
and the commodity nature of consumer goods will be
overcome through the appropriation of the economic
wealth of the advanced capitalist world — the fruit of the
transitional period inaugurated by the victory of the
international proletarian revolution. ■

Statement of
the Trotskyist
Faction

With the following statement, members of the Trotskyist
Faction of the British Workers Socialist League (WSL)
resigned from the WSL at its February 18-19 Conference.
The Trotskyist Faction's programmatic statements on
Ireland, Turkey and the general document "In Defence of a
Revolutionary Programme" had indicated a large measure
of agreement with the Trotskyist politics of the internation-
al Spartacist tendency (iSt). After several weeks of
intensive political discussions, the Trotskyist Faction fused
with the London Spartacist Group of the iSf to form a new
sympathizing section of the iSt, the Spartacist League!
Britain (SL/ B).

This fusion represented a major confirmation of the iSt's
policy of revolutionary regroupment and enabled the SL/ B
to launch a regular newspaper, Spartacist Britain, which
reprinted the major documents of the ex-Trotskyist
Faction in its first issue.

The debate at this conference has exposed in the clearest
light the majority's hostility to the highest task of Marxists
today: the construction of an international cadre hardened
in the fight for a communist programme.

The counterposition of the Bolshevik position of the
Trotskyist Faction to the hardened right centrism of the
central leadership has brought forth another shameless
defence of the majority's Pabloite attachment to the
Labour Party, their capitulationist attitude to nationalism,
and in particular Irish nationalism, their all-pervading
economism and minimalism and their parochialism.

It is apparent that the fight for the re-creation of the

Fourth International can only take place in implacable
opposition to this parody of Trotskyism. Recognising the
fundamental divergence between our faction and all other
tendencies within the Workers' Socialist League that has
been confirmed this weekend we resign from the WSL.

We intend to immediately open discussions with the
international Spartacist tendency, with the aim of moving
toward a fused organisation. Forward to the British section
of the reforged Fourth International!

Signers:

1. Eunice Aktar, WSL 1978, Liverpool Branch.

2. Richard Brookes, l.S. 1973-75, WSL 1975-78, Oxford
General Branch.

3. Carolyn Dixon, WSL 1977-78, Birmingham Branch.

4. E., WSL 1976-78. London Area Committee, Turkish Group.
Hackney Branch.

5. F., WSL 1976-78, Turkish Group, Hackney Branch.

6. Alastair Green, l.S. 1973-74; Left Opposition (ex-I.S.); RCG
1975; founder member WSL, 1975-78, West Midlands Area
Committee, Birmingham Branch chairman, convenor stu-
dent fraction, editorial board Socialist Press.

1. Clive Hills, WRP 1973-76, editorial board Keep Left (paper
of the Young Socialists, youth group of the WRP); WSL
1976-78, Oxford Student/Trent Branch.

8. Alan Holford, l.S. 1971-73 (expelled); Revolutionary
Opposition (ex-I.S.) 1972-74; founder member RCG 1974-75,
Political Committee; founder member WSL 1975-78,
National Committee, West Midlands Area chairman,
Birmingham Branch secretary, convenor of Women's
Commission.

9. Dewi Jones, WSL 1976-78, Liverpool Branch.

10. Mark Kinker, WSL 1977-78.

11. Leena, Maoist organisations (Asia) 1972-74; WSL 1977-78.

12. Paul Lannigan, SLL 1968-72, Derry Branch, Northern
Ireland, Irish National Committee (1968-70), full-time

continued on next page

18

SPARTACIST

Trotskyist Faction
Statement...

organiser Liverpool SLL/YS ( 1970-72); WSL 1977-78, Irish
Commission, West London Branch.

13. Cath McMillan, WSL 1977-78. Coventry Branch. ■

14. Joe Quigley, Communist Party of Great Britain, 1969-70; I. S.
1970-74 (expelled); Left Faction, Left Opposition (both of
i.S.); RCG 1975; founder member WSL 1975-78, National
Committee, North West Area secretary, Manchester Branch
secretary, Irish Commission.

15. Jim Saunders, I.S. 1974-76; WSL 1976-78, London Area
Committee, West London Branch secretary, Irish Commis-
sion„editorial board Socialist Press, Campaign for Democra-
cy in the Labour Movement, organising committee.

16. Mike Shortland, Young Communist League 1970-73; IMG
1975-76; WSL 1977-78. London Area Committee.

17. Robert Styles, WSL 1976-78.

18. Caroline Walton, WSL 1977-78, Central London Branch.

19. Jo Woodward, I.S. 1972-74 (expelled); Left Opposition (ex-
I.S.); WSL 1976-78, Coventry Branch.

20. Tim Woodward, I.S. I972-74(expelled); Left Opposition(ex-
I.S.); WSL 1976-78, West Midlands Area Committee,

Coventry Branch chairman, convenor NALGO union
fraction.

21. John Zucker. WSL 1976-78. Birmingham Branch.

Another comrade, not a member of the Trotskyist
Faction, resigned together with the faction and submitted
the appended statement:

Although not a member of the Trotskyist Faction, and
with some reservations, I supported their main perspectives
document, and I stand by that. The discussion and voting
at this conference have confirmed for me that the WSL is
not to be budged from what I regard as its fundamentally
wrong positions, and 1 therefore also resign.

Signed:

T., WRP 1974-75, expelled as part of the Thornett opposition;
WSL 1975-78. editorial board Socialist Press, London Area
Committee.

WSL: Workers Socialist League
WRP: Workers Revolutionary Party,

formerly the SLL: Socialist Labour League
YS: Young Socialists, youth group of the WRP
RCG: Revolutionary Communist Group
LS.: International Socialists, ^
now the SWP: Socialist Workers Party

The founding conference of the Spartacist League/Britain.

SUMMER 1978

19

Mandel...

(continued from page 5)

slandering their own com-
rades and refusing to publi-
cize their persecution and
even assassination — Pablo
& Co. also instructed Peng
not to give information
concerning this witchhunt
to a group of Vietnamese
Trotskyists who were re-
turning to their country to
enter the party of Ho Chi
Minh. Yet Ho was himself
responsible for the assassi-
nation of Vietnamese Trot-
skyist leader Ta Thu Thau
and scores of Fourth Inter-

nationalists who led the Ouatneme Internationale

August 1945 uprising Ta Thu Thau
against the reimposition of

Western colonial rule! The group of Vietnamese emigres
returned innocent of any knowledge of the Stalinist
repression being carried out in China — which wc uld no
doubt have dampened their enthusiasm for Pabl "s tactic
of "deep entrism" — and were, never heard from again.

Peng wrote in his letter that he had considered Mandel/
Germain "one of the most promising new leaders of our
movement," although "I had also noticed his lack of
penetrating analysis in observing various problems, his
impressionist temperament, wavering and conciliationist
spirit manifested very often on important problems, and
his facility in modifying his own positions." It was the latter
characteristics — impressionism and cowardice — which
drove Mandel into the arms of Pablo and ruined him as a
revolutionary leader. But this was more than a personal
tragedy. It was a major factor in allowing Pablo to tighten
his bureaucratic grip on the FI apparatus and ultimately to
destroy it. Mandel's craven political capitulation facilitated
the victory of Pabloist revisionism over the weak,
disoriented Fourth International — the political destruc-
tion of the world revolutionary instrument founded by
Trotsky. And it directly sabotaged the urgently needed
defense of the Chinese Trotskyists, who to this day remain
in Mao's jails (if they have not already died in prison).

Because of his personal weaknesses, Mandel became not
only a revisionist but a traitor to the Trotskyist movement.

Not only did the revisionist program of Pabloism mean
liquidation of the struggle to construct a Trotskyist
vanguard, it was soon expressed externally as well in a
series of political capitulatipns to Stalinism. When on 17
June 1953 the working class of East Berlin rose up against
their bureaucratic rulers — in the first instance against the
Russian army of occupation — the shock waves spread
throughout Europe. Playwright Bertold Brecht, a long-
time Communist Party member, penned an epigraph of
bitter irony and resignation: according to the authorities,
"the people had lost the confidence of the government and
could only win it back through redoubled effort. Wouldn't
it be easier if the government dissolved the people and
^^tecj another." What was the response of Pablo's
International Secretariat to this event, the first abortive
attempt at political revolution in the Soviet bloc? It issued a

manifesto calling for "real democratization of the Commu-
nist parties" — i.e. bureaucratic self-reform — and failed,
deliberately, to call for the withdrawal of Soviet troops
(Quatrieme Internationale, July 1953).

Three years later Pablo/ Mandel & Co. repeated this
capitulation to the Kremlin, this time by turning their
backs on the Hungarian workers who rose up against the
hated secret police and the Russian army. Contrasting this
attempt at proletarian anti-bureaucratig revolution unfa-
vorably to Poland, these fraudulent "Trotskyists" wrote
that the absence of a political leadership "provoked exactly
those flaws and dangers" which Poland had avoided
"thanks to the leadership role played by... the Gomulka
tendency ... a centrist tendency nonetheless evolving to the
left...." {Quatrieme Internationale, December 1956).
Again the perspective was that of pressuring the bureaucra-
cy, supporting one wing against another, and not
mobilizing the workers around an independent Trotskyist
party.

With the beginning of the 1960's, however, the Pabloists'
eyes turned toward 'the so-called "Third World" and in
particular the petty-bourgeois nationalists Ben Bella
(Algeria) and Castro. While recognizing that the Cuban
bourgeoisie had been expropriated as a class with the
nationalizations of fall/winter 1960, they went further and
gave political support to the Castro leadership. In this
Pablo, Mandel et al. were joined by the American SWP,
which in 1953 had belatedly but firmly rejected the
liquidationist consequences of Pabloism. The SWP put
forward a document ("For Early Reunification of the
Trotskyist Movement") in March 1963 which stated: "In its
evolution toward revolutionary Marxism, the [Castroite]
July 26 Movement set a pattern that now stands as an
example for a number of other countries." This was the
founding document of the "United Secretariat" (USec)
now headed by Mandel.

In another document at this time SWP leader. Joseph
Hansen wrote that Cuba was a workers state "lacking as yet
the forms of democratic proletarian rule." It certainly was
true that it lacked the forms... and the substance. In fact,
Castro and Guevara proved this quite conclusively by
jailing the Cuban Trotskyists in 1963. Trotsky's book.
Permanent Revolution, was proscribed and the printing
plates containing the offending text were smashed on the
presses! Guevara, the USec's special favorite, even
continued on next page

\ won/tens 1

Name

Address

City/State/Zip

□ Enclosed is $5 for 48 issues — includes Spartacist ■

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20

SPARTACIST

Mandel...

suggested that the Trotskyists were Yankee agents, noting
that they had long had influence in the city of Guantanamo
(near the U.S. base). But at this very moment Mandel was
meeting with Guevara at the ministry of industry and
counseling "my friend 'Che'" on economic policies. And
what was he advising the "heroic guerrilla"-to-be? Was he
"fighting for workers democracy" in the corridors of
power, perhaps? Hardly. Here is what Mandel wrote in the
journal of Guevara's ministry, Nuestra Industria:

"The more underdeveloped a country's economy ... the
wiser it is in our opinion to reserve decision-making power
over the more important investments and fmancial matters
to the central authorities."

— "Mercantile Categories in the Period of
Transition," in Bertram Silverman, ed., Man and
Socialism in Cuba

This is an unalloyed apology for the extremely irrational
economic "planning" by the Cuban bureaucracy, where
decisions were so centralized that everything was decided
by the Hder mdximo from the saddle of his jeep.

The Stalinist repression did not faze the Pabloists. It
seemed nothing could. Thus when Castro launched his
famous, frothing attack against Trotskyism at the 1966
Tricontinental Congress in Havana, USec leader Hansen
wrote that,

"however much it satisfied the right-wing CP leaderships, it
was taken by all vanguard elements with any real knowledge
of the Trotskyist movement as at best a mistaken identifica-
tion of Trotskyism with the bizarre sect of J. Posadas and at
worst nothing but a belated echo of old Stalinist slanders, the
purpose of which remained completely obscure."

— International Socialist Review, November-
December 1967

For the proletarian militants who had been locked up in
Castro's prisons the purpose of his attack was not at all
obscure. The USec apologists for Cuban Stalinism were

right about one thing, however. In denouncing Trotskyism
Castro was directing his fire not at them but at those who
call for political revolution to overthrow this bonapartist
regime and replace it with the democratic rule of Soviets.
Any equation of the capitulationist policies of the USec
with this Marxist program — uniquely upheld by the
international Spartacist tendency — is clearly a case of
mistaken identity. If the charge is Trotskyism then Ernest
Mandel can plead in good conscience: "Not guilty!"

From Guerrillaism to Popular Frontism

The principal focus during the late 1960's of the
Mandelites' quest for a shortcut to fame and fortune was
the Castroite movement in Latin America. Thus a
resolution passed at the USec's "Ninth World Congress" in
1969 stated point-blank:

"Even in the case of countries where large mobilizations and
class conflicts in the cities may occur first, civil war will take
manifold forms of armed struggle, in which the principal axis

for a whole period will be rural guerrilla warfare "

— "Draft Resolution on Latin America," in [SWP]
International Information Bulletin, January 1969

The first task of USec supporters in Latin America,
therefore, would be: "(a) Integration into the historic
revolutionary current represented by the Cuban revolution

and the OLAS " This was in essence the same

liquidationist perspective put forward in the early 1950's by
Pablo — only the recipient of the political flattery and
capitulations had changed.

Mandel, as is his wont, expressed himself more
circumspectly on the subject of guerrillaism than gung-ho
"pick-up-the-gun" Guevarists like Livio Maitan. But as to
the continuity of Pabloist methodology Mandel was
certainly frank; in an article on "The Place of the Ninth
Wory Congress in the History of the Fourth Internation-
al" (1969), he wrote:

"The situation began to change in the course of the I960's and
it was the French May 1968 which most clearly revealed this

SPARTACIST

edicidn en espafiol

50 us

• INo al franquismo «reforniado»!

• «Extrema izquierda» y las elecciones Suirez

• OTR chitena fusiona con tendencia espartaquista

• Fu$i6n de SL/U.S. y Red Flag Union

• «La Pasionai1a»: iVoz de resistencia o eco de traicldn?

Giros/cheques a:
Spartacist Publishing Co.
Box 1377, GPO/NY, NY 10001 USA^

SUMMER 1978

21

change. . . . The Ninth World Congress sought to bring this
change to the attention of the entire international revolu-
tionary movement.

"The most striking trait of the change is the appearance of a
new revolutionary vanguard on a universal scale which has
completely escaped from the control of the Stalinist and
reformist apparatuses and is organized autonomously, The
first important/signs of this new phenomenon go back quite a
ways: the 'July 26 Movement,' which led the guerrilla
struggle which overthrew the Batista dictatorship indepen-
dently of the CP and of all traditional organizations of the
Cuban left "

"This turn is not only a turn toward the creation of
independent organizations, capable of serving as poles of
attraction for the militants of the new vanguard who are
neither reformists nor Stalinists, and who seek to regroup
nationally and internationally. It also implies a change of
accent as to the principal forms of activity of the movement.
In this sense it has the same importance as the turn outlined
by the Third World Congress, but at a much more advanced
stage of construction of the International."

The Third Congress of the Fourth International was when
Pablo first elaborated his plans for "deep entry" into the
mass Stalinist and social-democratic parties. Mandel goes
on:

"At the Third World Congress it was a question of breaking
with essentially isolated activity and integrating into the
revolutionary mass movement. At the Ninth World Congress
it was a question of breaking with an essentially propagandist
practice —i.e., centered on criticizing the betrayals and errors
of the traditional leaderships-^. .. and of passing over to a
phase where we are capable of undertaking revolutionary
initiatives, within the mass movement."

— La longue marche de la revolution (1976)

In both cases the essence of the "tactic" was capitulation
befol-e alien class forces. The American SWP under
Hansen objected to the "guerrilla turn" of the "Ninth
Congress," but only because it wanted to make a bloc with
liberals opposed to the Vietnam war. Democratic Party
"doves" were not about to get on a platform with
supporters of "terrorism" in Latin America. The Mandel-
ites were not able to cash in on their maneuver, however.
Castro's OLAS never
did anything to organize
"two, three, many Viet-
nams" after Guevara's
debacle in Bolivia. And
the two main USec
groups engaged in guer-
rilla struggle defected:
the Bolivians to join
the Castroite ELN en
masse, and the Argen-
tine PRT splitting from
Mandel & Co. in 1973.

As it became clear
that there was no short-
cut to power in La Paz
or Santiago by heading
for the hills, the pro-
Moscow Communist
parties revived their
refrains of a "peaceful
road." In Chile the
vehicle was to be the

Ui\idac^l(*opular (UP), a popular front of the Communist
ana'Ȥocialist parties together with small bourgeois parties,
which~"was headed by Salvador Allende. Meanwhile in

Ho Chi Minh

Roger Pic

Europe, in the aftermath of the 1968-69 working-class and
youth upsurge the reformists were looking for means to
head off a mass radicalization with revolutionary implica-
tions. Their answer was a new wave of popular frontism:
the French Union of the Left, the Italian CP's strategy of an
"historic compromise."

The Chilean experience was pivotal. In a certain sense it
was a bridge from the guerrillaism of the late 1960's to the
popular frontism of the 1970's. It was also — and most
importantly— the battleground on which the drama of the
popular front was played out to the bitter finale. The
"peaceful road" ended in a bloodbath. The responsibility of
the Stalinists and social democrats, who preached faith in
the officer corps and "democratic" bourgeoisie, is patent.
But neither does Ernest Mandel's United Secretariat have
clean hands. First its Chilean supporters hailed AUende's
1970 electoral victory. Then, a year later, the USec itself
issued a "unanimous" statement terming the UP a popular
front and even declaring:

"Complete independence must be maintained with regard to
the popular front coalition. Revolutionists cannot partici-
pate in such a coalition even by offering it electoral support.
(Revolutionary Marxists can, in certain situations, vote fora
labor candidate but not for a candidate of a front that
includes petty-bourgeois and bourgeois parties.)"
Intercontinental Press, 21 February 1972

This policy was put forward only by the international
Spartacist tendency at the time of the 1970 Chilean
elections. Moreover, at no time since then has the USec
refused to vote for all popular front candidates. But this
curious declaration does indicate that they are not ignorant
of the orthodox Trotskyist policy toward popular
fronts. . .just opposed to it. In any case, none of the several
groups of Chilean USec supporters ever carried out this
policy. And in September 1973, on the morrow of the
Santiago coup, a "Draft Political Resolution" by the
usee's Mandelite majority reversed its previous verdict on
the UP, declaring:

". . . from the start, it differed from a classical Popular Front
regime by the fact that it openly proclaimed its resolve to
enter on the road of socialism, and that it openly based itself
on the organized workers movement."

— [SWP] International Internal Discussion Bulletin,
October 1973

This deliberate confusionism, designed to cover up the
usee's total failure to present a revolutionary alternative to
Allende ,& Co., was soon compounded in Europe. In
France in 1973, the Mandelite LCR called for votes to the
Union of the Left on the second round in parliamentary
elections; in 1974 it called for votes on the second round for
the single candidate of the popular front for the presidency
(Mitterrand); in 1977 it called for votes for Union of the
Left slates (including bourgeois Left Radical candidates)
on the second round of municipal elections, and with the
scantiest of fig leaves called for abstention only where the
slate was headed by a Radical.

Similarly in Italy the USec section ran candidates on the
Democrazia Proletaria ticket in the June 1976 parliamen-
tary elections. While standing to the left of the Communist
Party's program for a coalition with the Christian
Democrats, the DP advocated a Chilean-style popular
front with the minor republican and secular parties of the
bourgeoisie. And irl Portugal not only did Mandel's
disciples join a front, the FUT, which supported and had
continued on next page

22

SPARTACIST

Mandel...

the blessing of a wing of the Armed Forces Movement; but
in the June 1976 presidential elections USec Mandelite
superstar Krivine advocated voting for Otelo de Carvalho,
a general of the bourgeois officer corps!

From being handmaidens of the Kremlin in the 1950's
and cheerleaders for the Castroites in the 1960's, these
inveterate renegades from Trotskyism had become a left
pressure group on the popular fronts of the I970's.

Labels

When the United Secretariat was formed in 1963, both
parties agreed to let "bygones be bygones," and differences
over China, "deep entrism" and other disputed questions
were declared off-limits. However, with the first signs of
mass radicalization all the old differences resurfaced, with
the SWP and its satellites squaring off against Mandel and
friends (the old guard of Pablo lieutenants). The result was
a factional struggle in the USec that lasted from 1969 to
1977, with bitter public attacks on each other by the SWF-
led reformist minority and the centrist International
Majority Tendency (I MT). When the IMT opened the door
last year to dissolution of the factions, by backing off from
its previous support to Guevarist guerrillaism, it was with
the understanding that previous factional documents
would be relegated to the status of "historical material."

Thus even though there is a real approximation of
political appetites between the ex-IMT and the SWP
during this popular front period, the USec remains a rotten

bloc. It is not surprising, then, that Mandel should
periodically propose to abandon his phony "Fourth
International" altogether, in favor of polymorphous
groupings of the broad "far left." Such perverse creatures
would unite virulently anti-Soviet Maoists, ostensible
Trotskyists and syndicalist-spontaneists, with the only
possible political basis being the desire to pressure a larger
popular front of the traditional workers parties to the left.
Thus in an interview with a Spanish leftist review in late
1976 Mandel stated:

"In my opinion the future of the revolutionary movement is
in the kind of groups which are broader than those which call
themselves Trotskyist. Groupings which, however, unite
with sections of the Fourth International."
-Topo Viejo. November 1976

A few months earlier Mandel had floated the same
concept in a dialogue with the left wing of the French PSU,
led by none other than Michel Pablo. Asked if the French
LCR wasn't closer to some of the Italian Mao-syndicalist
groups than to the American SWP, Mandel responded:
". . . the real debate is not over the label, the organizational
framework, the statutes, the human relations or references to

a fellow with a beard named Leon Trotsky

"What difference do labels make? If we should find in the
political arena forces which agreed with our strategic and
tactical orientation, and which were only put off by the
historical reference and the name, we would get rid of the
latter inside of 24 hours."

- Politique Hehdo, \(i-\b iunt

PSU left-wing leader Yvan Craipeau, himself a former
Trotskyist, responded that it was not enough to change
labels: it was necessary to renounce the Leninist conception
of the party as well.

Tor Mao, the Cultural Revolution was a cynical maneuver to recover authority lost to party enemies during the'
"Great Leap" disaster.

SUMMER 1978

23

Does this kind of maneuver offer the USec jugglers an
effective means of reaching the "new vanguard," and subtly
gaining hegemony over it? One only has to cast a brief
backwards glance to observe the results of past attempts of
this sort. The archetype of such a centrist grouping in the
recent past is the Chilean MIR, a Castroite group set up in
1965 with the active intervention of the USec affiliate led by
Luis Vitale. All the "labels" were abandoned (Fourth
International, Trotskyism, permanent revolution,
deformed/degenerated workers states), but on the basis of
a vague left-of-the-CP program the USec's World Out-
look (17 September 1965) declared the MIR the "most
important Marxist-Leninist party yet to be formed in
Chile...."

Less than two years later, however, the MIR leadership
began systematically purging all "Trotskyists," soon
including Vitale and other top leaders. Undaunted, the
European Mandelites (and the expelled Vitale) continued
flattering their centrist creation, and it was partly in order
to stay close to the MIR that the IMT took a position of de
facto "critical support" to the UP. The Latin American
commission of the French LCR protested against the
December 1971 USec resolution on Chile (quoted above)
because of its mild criticisms of the MIR, claiming that the
latter had "an absolutely clear position on the question of
permanent revolution" and "the influence of Trotskyist
positions" ([SWP] International Internal Discussion
Bulletin, February 1973). The Mandelites criticized their
own fraternal organization in Chile as worse than the MIR,
and have frequently raised large sums for the Castroites
while leaving their comrades begging for crumbs!

But the classic example of the kind of '*broad" grouping,
"including Trotskyists," of which Mandel dreams is the
' Spanish POUM, established in 1935 as a fusion of the
Communist Left (headed by Andres Nin) and Joaquin
Maurin's Workers and Peasants Bloc. It too dropped the

labels, and took ambiguous positions on the nature ot
Stalin's Russia, popular frontism and other vital issues.
Trotsky's answer to this was to break all political ties to the
renegade Nin and to call for a vigilant struggle within the
Fourth Internationalist movement against those sympa-
thetic to the POUM and similar centrist roadblocks. With
its vacillations, this unstable amalgam became the worst
enemy of proletarian revolution in Spain, Trotsky wrote.
And that is precisely what would become of the products of
Mandel's opportunist "regroupments" if they succeeded in
gaining mass support.

Objectivism and Capitulators

In the last two years the major new development on the
European left has been the appearance of a Eurocommu-
nist current. As one might expect from Mandel, ever ready
to tail after a new rage, the USec leader saw this process as
possibly leading to a conversion of longtime Stalinist hacks
like Santiago Carrillo into Leninists! In the second
installment of the Topo Viejo interview quoted previously,
Mandel refers to the contradiction between the "positive
and negative aspect" of the rise of Eurocommunism:

"The leading comrades of the Communist Party, especially
its worker cadres, must take on [this contradiction] and
resolve it; and 1 hope and believe that they will be capable of
resolving it positively, in the sense of returning to the path of-
revolutionary Marxism.

"Eurocommunism is a policy of transition, although no one
knows what to or where to. Perhaps it represents a transition
to the reabsorption of the Communist parties by social
democracy, something which in my opinion is rather
unlikely, but not totally impossible. Perhaps it will be a
transition to a new Stalinism. And also— why not?— it could
be a transition, on the part of the worker cadres of the pa ' ty,
to a reacquaintance with revolutionary Marxism, vvith
Leninism."

— Topo Viejo, December 1976

continued on next page

24

SPARTACIST

Mandel

This brings us right back to 1950's vintage Pabloism,
seeing the "leading comrades" of the CPs as perhaps
salvageable for the revolution. Thus once again independ-
ent Trotskyist parties and an authentic Fourth Internation-
al built in struggle against Stalinism, social democracy and
all varieties of centrism are superfluous (mere "labels" to be
discarded in the course of organizational maneuvers). But
it should be obvious even to those unfamiliar with the
various ostensibly Trotskyist groups that there is some-
thing grievously amiss with a "Trotskyist" who does not
seek to build Trotskyist parties and a Trotskyist interna-
tional. The sickness is diagnosed as Pabloist liquidation-
ism, and Ernest Mandel is one of the prime carriers.

Mandel's political revisionism is closely linked to his eco-
nomics, which are marked by a fundamental objectivism.
In the early 1950's he argued that "the relation of forces
has evolved decisively in favor of the anti-capitalist camp."
Thus by lining up with the pro-Soviet parties one would be in
position to capture leadership of the revolutionary mass
movements which would inevitably be generated by the
CPs. At the same time he argued that the restoration of
capitalism in the USSR "is no longer in the realm of the
possible" in the short run ("Decline and Fall of Stalinism,"
resolution presented to the Pabloist "Fifth World Con-
gress," Quatrieme Internationale, December 1957).

In the mid-1960's version of this
objectivism, Mandel asserted that
capitalism "will not again experi-
ence new crises such as 1929"
{Temps Modernes, August-
September 1964). Consequently
under "neocapitalism" the transi-
tional program was transformed
into a smorgasbord of "anti-
capitalist structural reforms." This
objectivism is at the very heart of his
outlook. Thus the opening sentence
of his Introduction to Marxist
Economic Theory reads: "In the last
analysis, every step forward in the
history of civilization has been
brought about by an increase in the
productivity of labor." Contrast
this, for example, with the Commu-
nist Manifesto, which states equally
succinctly: "The history of all
hitherto existing society is the
history of class struggles."

One of the best examples of
Mandel's politico-economic objec-
tivism is his January 1953 letter to
Jean-Paul Sartre, written under the
impact of the Chinese revolution:

"For us the nature of a period is not

determined in the first instance by

the leadership of the mass move-
ment but by its extent. . . . Never in

the history of capitalism has there

been a period during which, over

the entire globe, the number of

participants, the violence and

extent of this mass movement

have been as considerable as today. That is why we consider
the present period as an eminently revolutionary period.
". . . Qn the world scale, the relation of forces is evolving in a
manner increasingly unfavorable to capitalism."
— La longue marche de la revolution

We have pointed out elsewhere the similarities between the
economist objectivism of Mandel and Bukhafin, with the
former's "long waves" a more generalized version of the
latter's "periods" of imperialism. Trotsky wrote in 1928 in
response to Bukharin's draft program for the Stalinized
Comintern — based on the assertion of a "Third Period" of
terminal capitalist crisis — a polemic which utterly demol-
ishes the objectivist tailism of Ernest Mandel:

"But as soon as the objective prerequisites have matured, the
key to the whole historical process passes into the hands of
the subjective factor, that is, the party. Opportunism which
consciously or unconsciously thrives upon the inspiration of
the past epoch, always tends to underestimate the role of the
subjective factor, that is, the importance of the party and of
revolutionary leadership. All this was fully disclosed during
the discussions on the lessons of the German October, on the
Anglo-Russian Committee, and on the Chinese revolution.
In all these cases, as well as in others of lesser importance, the
opportunistic tendency evinced itself in the adoption of a
course that relied solely upon the 'masses' and therefore
completely scorned the question of the 'tops' of the
revolutionary leadership. Such an attitude, which is false in
general, operates with positively fatal effect in the imperialist
epoch."

— Third International After Lenin

Just Out!

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And much more besides:
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wildcats in the coalfields;
crisis in the UMWA. Not
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Workers Vanguard pamphlet SI. 50

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ngle copy, $1.
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THE GREAT
COAL STRIKE
OF 1978

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Address.
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SUMMER 1978

25

Swedish USec...

(continued from page 32)

the party," put forward a strategy counterposed to that of
the KAF: the need to construct an alternative leadership,
based on a revolutionary transitional program, to oust the
pro-capitalist labor "leaders."

The reaction of the KAF leadership to "For a Trotskyist
Program" was not a political reply but an attempt to
instigate organizational measures against the dissidents on
the grounds that their views overlapped those of the
Spartacist tendency. At the instigation of one Jakob
Lundmark, head of the former pro-SWP faction, the KAF
Political Bureau (PB) addressed a letter to Christer and
Gunilla demanding they affirm that the KAF and the USec
were "revolutionary Trotskyist organizations which stand
for revolutionary politics and represent a continuity back
to the Fourth International's founding Congress in 1938
and the early Comintern" (letter of 26 November 1977). In
a document we reprint below, the two comrades replied
that the PB's demand for a loyalty oath was simply an
attempt to expel them "solely on the basis of our political
views and our political struggle." They noted they were
being victimized for political "characterizations that were
acceptable before this" that is, before the bitter faction
fight in the USec was shoved under the diplomatic rug.

In their courageous reply, the comrades exposed the
USec rotten bloc, noting the former factions' public
criticisms of each other and contrasting the PB's concern
that they affirm the USec's "continuity" to the Fourth
International with Ernest Mandel's infamous 1976 state-
ment, "What do labels matter?" While noting the difficulty
of judging any political current from a distance, Christer
and Gunilla forthrightly refused to deny the "commonali-
ty" of their views with the iSt "on some questions."

The PB responded with a draconian recommendation
that the two be expelled at the upcoming KAF congress. A
special Commission of Inquiry was constituted and
enjoined to discover some basis for this purge. The
Commission began to take testimony from members of the
several locals of which the dissidents had been members
during their years in the KAF. Simultaneously, to provide
a political cover, Lundmark distributed a turgid ten-page
attack on Christer and Gunilla and the iSt, drawing heavily
on the political distortions of ex-Spartacist Bob Pearlman,
now in the American SWP.

But the scheme backfired. The witchhunting "inquiry"
could produce not a shred of evidence of indiscipline by
Christer and Gunilla, but only testimonials to their
seriousness and disciplined functioning, as comrades who
had worked with them in branches over the years testified
to their dedication and active work as KAF members.
Faced with the Commission's refusal to recommend that
the comrades be expelled, the embarrassed leadership was
abruptly forced to change its mind: about taking up the
question of disciplinary action at the congress. Despite a
statement protesting the leadership's bureaucratic maneu-
ver signed by 1 8 delegates, the matter was tabled to the next
j meeting of the KAF Central Committee. The CC set up yet
another ^'investigative" body which was instructed to look
into such matters as the oppositionists' "uncomradely
tone." But even this second, presumably more carefully

picked, commission refused to cover for a purely political
expulsion and again exonerated the two comrades.

The ferocious purge assault directed at Comrades
Christer and Gunilla was a test of the KAF leadership's
willingness to abandon the remnants of its left past to act as
loyal flunkies for Mandel— a test which the KAF PB
"passed" with flying colors. The leadership is moving to
expunge from the cadres any left impulses remaining from
the KAF in its earlier period. To their credit, some of the
KAF cadres refused to be sucked into complicity with the
leadership's cynical attempts to carry out the first political
expulsion in the history of the organization. But the KAF
has moved very far from the leftist impressionism of its
younger days, and with the "help" of its international
mentors of the USec it will rapidly complete its rightist
consolidation.

In the months following the congress, the KAF has
undergone massive disintegration. An internal bulletin
noted:

"Education did not function. On the whole, members and
candidates complain of lack of education. However,
emphasis on pre-conference discussion went by the boards.
The expectations of many people were transformed into
disappointment.... Propaganda does not function in any
meaningful way.... Recruitment is uneven, ..we have a
minimum of local intervention... we are losing people in the
trade unions."

Stockholm local bulletin No. 61

Members have been leaving the KAF in significant
numbers. In fact, according to a leadership report to the
Stockholm local, only one functional trade-union fraction
remained in the city: day-care center employees. The state-
capitalist Tendency D quit and the workerist Tendency C
retreated into passivity, apparently content to allow the
leadership to do as it pleased in exchange for being left in
peace to do "its" trade-union work. Thus the main winner
at the congress was the pro-SWP wing; with the KAF
moving ever more to the right in its capitulation to the
petty-bourgeois "movements" like anti-nuclear power and
its rotten blocs with social democrats and Stalinists, the
reformist political logic of the SWP is gaining strength in
the organization.

Explosive factional potential still lurks beneath the
diplomatic ceasefire in the USec. But the SWP's social-
democratic reformism cannot be effectively combated by
the impressionistic centrism of the IMT. To the SWP's
"strategy" of becoming the "best builders" of petty-
bourgeois and reformist organizations under the "theory"
that "consistent" democracy equals socialism, the IMT can
counterpose only a verbal sleight-of-hand which terms the
disgruntlements of disparate strata a "new radicalization"
of a new "vanguard."

Refusing to capitulate to joint majority/minority
attempts to stifle all internal discussion in the KAF,
Christer and Gunilla wrote a major political reply to the
maneuvers of the KAF leadership and to Lundmark's
slanderous attack on them and the international Spartacist
tendency. Their document, which is also reprinted below,
focuses on the political issues: Lundmark's falsification of
the USec's own past; the leadership's capitulation to
popular frontism in France and Chile, to Castroism in
Cuba and more generally to Stalinism; Lundmark's
pathetic attempts to distort the SWP's position on sending
federal troops to Boston in order to justify it; and why the
continued on next page

26

SPARTACIST

Swedish USec...

USec leadership is obliged to blatantly distort positions of
the international Spartacist tendency in ways obvious to
anyone reasonably familiar with its published material.

However, even with all political discussion effectively
blocked, with the organization in a shambles, with the 1 MT
and SWP loyalists more than willing to join hands against
any serious left opposition, Christer and Gunilla refused to
abandon the struggle for the internationalist program of
authentic Trotskyism, and resigned from the KAF in

February to pursue political discussion with the internation-
al Spartacist tendency. Through their work with the
Stockholm Spartacist comrades and through such activities
as the Stockholm public meeting on the KAF and the recent
publication of the documentation of their oppositional
struggle, the comrades demonstrate their commitment to
assisting their former comrades of the KAF to find the road
forward to the authentic Trotskyism of the iSt. ■

—adapted from "Swedish USec Face to Face
with Trotskyism. " WV No. 204, 5 May 1978

Statement of Resignation
from the KAF

To t^ie Political Bureau/ Executive Committee:

"The crisis of the proletarian leadership cannot, of course, be
overcome by means of an abstract formula. It isaquestion of
an extremely humdrum process. But not of a purely 'historical'
process, that is, oftheobjectivepremisesofconsciousactivity,
but of an uninterrupted chain of ideological, political and
organizational measures for the purpose of fusing together the
best, most conscious elements of the world proletariat beneath
a spotless banner, elements whose number and self-
confidence must be constantly strengthened, whose connec-
tions with wider sections of the proletariat must be developed
and deepened— in a word: to restore to the proletariat, under
new ajid highly difficult and onerous conditions, its historical
leadership."

— LeonTrotsky, IVritings, /9i5-i6(first edition),p. 112

After reading that tangle of distortions, slanders and
outright falsehoods presented as a political document under
the name of Jakob Lundmark (see "Comments on a
Farewell to the Class Struggle and Politics"), we feel
compelled to reply, even if only briefly.

1 f Lundmark'sdocument is the best that the SWP forces in
Sweden (aided and abetted by the majorityites)can produce,
then the KAFisinworseshapethan we thought. Distortions
and falsehoods aside, the tendency throughout the docu-
ment is the utter disdain of the KAF leadership for the
history and politics of Trotskyism.

The KAF PB claims that a respect for the history and
continuity of Trotskyism is a condition for membership in
the KAF and the United Secretariat (USec).

Unfortunately, the Lundmark document clearly asserts
that an evaluation of that history is a secondary question,
subordinate to organizational maneuvers:

"The reunification did not solve the problems which led to the
52-54 split. This means that the International did not reach a
common understanding of the deviation from the immediate
perspective of the Transitional Program which characterized
the development of world revolution after the Second World
War.lt was correct not to make discussion of the history of the
International a roadblock to common work in an organiza-
tion..." (Lundmark, p. 2) ^

In spite of assurances to the contrary, the KAF leadership
proclaims here that it considers it correct not only to have no
position on the last forty years of the history of the
Trotskyist movement, but also to refuse to discuss this
question. One cannot conceive of Lenin fusing with

Trotsky's group in 1917 while "agreeing to disagree" about
the disputes which earlier had separated the Bolsheviks
from the Mensheviks and Conciliators (i.e.. all the groups
that wanted to reconcile the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks),
or of Trotsky accepting a group into the Left Opposition or
the Fourth International while passing over its history in
silence!

The reason why these questions could not be discussed in
1963 is clear: while the SWP's capitulation to the Pabloites
was decisive, it was not yet complete, since differences still
existed over the 1953 split, China and other crucial
questions. Reunification was based on refusing to discuss
these political differences. Yet the USec leadership today is
sufficiently shatrieless to accuse those groupings in the
International Committee which demanded a clarifying
political discussion of "fleeing from political discussion,"
supposedly "under the pretext of rejecting a capitulation to
'Pabloism'" (Lundmark, p. 4). The hypocrisy of the KAF
leadership knows no bounds.

The political rationale for this refusal todiscussquestions
of crucial importance to any serious Trotskyist is encapsu-
lated in the statement, so characteristic of the KAF
leadership: "While Marxist criticism takes as its starting
point the actual movement of the masses in order to give
them a scientific understanding of their experience..."
(Lundmark, p. 5). This type of statement serves the USec as
an excuse not to raise the Trotskyist program, but to
capitulate instead to the "new mass vanguard." This
typically revisionist line was answered long ago by Trotsky:
"Our tasks don't depend on the mentality of the workers. The
task is to develop the mentality of the workers. That is what
the program should formulate and present before the
advanced workers. Some will say: good, the program is a
scientific program; it corresponds to the objective situation
but if the workers won't accept this program, it will be sterile.
Possibly. But this signifies only that the workers will be
crushed since the crisis can't be solved any other way but by
the socialist revolution." /

—Leon Trotsky, Writings, /9J«-i9 (first edition),
pp. 43-44

The USec and KAF's rejection of political program goes
hand in hand with their mindless glorification of anything
that "lives and struggles." By giving "concrete struggles'^"'
priority over political clarification, the KAF leadership

SUMMER 1978

27

simply echoes banally Bernstein's classic statement of
revisionism: "The movement is everything, the final goal
nothing." Lundmark and the KAF leadership are quite
shameless about this: "...we support every struggle [sic!]
against imperialist or bureaucratic oppression regardless of
or despite the illusions which the masses have concerning
petty-bourgeois leaderships or reformist solutions" (Lund-
mark, p. 6). That is true. Our leading Pabloists have tailed
after petty-bourgeois nationalist leaderships for years. The
KAF leadership accuses us and the iSt of "parasitic
sectarianism" (Lundmark, p. 6) for daring to criticize such
petty-bourgeois leaderships. Again, we can do no better
than to let Trotsky reply to such charges. In 1935 Pierre
Frank and Molinier accused Trotsky's supporters of
"organizational ultimatism" for refusing to capitulate to
Marceau Pivert (old dogs never learn new tricks, it seems).
Trotsky replied:

"'No organizational ultimatism.' What a revolting distortion
of the Leninist formulation! No ultimatism whatsoever in
relation to the masses, the trade unions, the workers'
movement; but the most intransigent ultimatism in relation
to any group that claim^ to lead the masses. The ultimatism
we are talking about is called the Marxist program."

— Leon Trotsky, The Crisis of the French Section
(1935-36), p. 106
Trotsky's polemics against the Frank-lViolinier clique,
recently published in The Crisis of the French Section
(1935-36), deserve wide circulation in the KAF.

It is because for the KAF and USec leadership "the
struggle is everything, the program nothing" that they
resort to unbridled demagogy and feel free to falsify their
own history as well as others'. We will take up a few
examples of this below.

Lundmark gives a series of revealing examples of the way
in which the Pabloites have "supported" various move-
ments. Thus he says, "We could 'support' a Union of the Left
government against a reactionary coup in the same way as
the Bolsheviks supported Kerensky against Kornilov"
(Lundmark, pp. 5-6). Quite true.

But that is not the question, comrades.
The question is, do you vote in elections to bring such a
government to power? Do you vote for the popular-front
U nion of the Left (as the French LCR has consistently done)
via one or several of its representative parties? Did you vote
to bring AUende to power in Chile? Is Lundmark suggesting
that the Bolsheviks should have "supported" the Kerensky
government by voting for it if the opportunity had existed?
Or should the Bolsheviks perhaps have supported Keren-
sky's government to the extent that it carried out progressive
measures— a position resolutely opposed by Lenin. Appar-
ently Lundmark does, since his document even declares
support, in a different context, for the "Ben Bella
government's anti-capitalist measures" (Lundmark, p. 6).

Comrades, it is blatantly dishonest and demagogic to
compare voting to put a bourgeois government headed by a
Kerensky (or an Allende, Mitterrand or Soares) into power
with militarily defending their government against a rightist
coup.

Furthermore, Lundmark declares his support for "the
right of the Yugoslav workers state under Tito to act
independently of the Stalin regime" (Lundmark, p. 6).
llnfortunalely, facts are tenacious. The Fourth Interna-
tional did more than just choose sides in a squabble
between Stalinists. One of the very serious errors of the

Fourth International in the postwar period was to claim
that Tito and the Yugoslav bureaucracy were "genuine
communists" who had decisively broken from Stalinism.
The International Secretariat repeatedly sought a political
bloc with the Yugoslav Stalinists, even raising the
possibility that they might join the Fourth International.
"Work brigades" were also recruited to go to Yugoslavia to
help "build socialism." This is a much different question
than resolute opposition to the possibility of Soviet
military intervention into Yugoslavia.

Concerning the question of Boston, Lundmark is forced
to take refuge in omitting certain facts in order to hide the
SWP's true position. Lundmark (p. 7) quotes the statement
by Pearlman: "In practice ... the call for federal troops was
never counterposed to self-defense efforts." But in the very
passages he quotes from Pearlman, he conveniently omits
the following sentence: "At no time was the call for labor
defense squads for Black students anything more than
empty sloganeering" (B. Pearlman, "Spartacist: The
Making of an American Sect," Intercontinental Press No.
21, [6 June] 1977, p. 648).

How can "empty sloganeering" be "complementary" to
what the SWP claims was the "real" issue, namely calling
on the bourgeois state to protect the rights of the
oppressed?

Does the KAF reject, like Pearlman and the SWP,
Trotsky's view in the Transitional Program?

"In connection with every strike and street demonstration, it
is imperative to propagate the necessity of creating workers
groups for self-defense

"It is necessary to advance the slogan of a workers' militia as
the one serious guarantee for the inviolability of workers'
organizations, meetings and press."

— Transitional Program, 1977 Swedish edition, p. 38

Lundmark, together with Pearlman and the KAF and
USec leaderships, is careful to avoid answering the
question "Is it not, as the Spartacists assert, 'unprincipled'
to demand that the armed forces of the bourgeois state
defend the oppressed?" (Lundmark, p. 7). Instead,
Pearlman scornfully dismisses as "Super-Marxists" those
who, like Lenin and Engels, consider, to quote Pearlman,
"that the state, in the last resort, is 'special bodies of armed
men' and that therefore the police and the army are the
'arms of the ruling class'" (quoted by Pearlman, p. 649).
What is the position of the KAF leadership on the SWP's
fundamental revision of the Marxist concept of the state?

Finally, the KAF leadership attacks the Spartacists for
putting forward the slogan "Military Victory to the NLF'
during the antiwar movement in the U.S. and accuses
them of "unmasking the NLF to the American masses"
(Lundmark, p. 8). Just what is wrong with that? Before the
Tenth World Congress even Ernest Mandel felt called upon
to mildly chide the SWP for its slogan, "Out Now," and his
criticism was repeated more forcefully by other USec
leaders. Even within the KAF this criticism against the
SWP was presented, wasn't it, comrades?

In order to attack our positions the KAF leadership is
obliged to assume that its membership is ignorant and that
even when comrades may recognize distortions and
demagogy they don't care enough about political program
to object.

We reject these insults to the membership of the KAF.
Not content to play on comrades' ignorance, Lundmark

continued on next, page

28

SPARTACIST

KAF Resignation...

and the KAF leadership must resort to outright
falsification.

Comrade Lundmark (and behind him the not so invisible
hand of the SWP) accuses the International Committee
[I.e.] of refusing to defend Cuba against imperialist attack,
in particular during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. This is
a serious charge; the problem is that it is false.

The statement which Lundmark quotes was issued by the
I.e. on 28 October 1962 under the title "Defend the Cuban
Revolution."

"The working class of the world must act to prevent the
Cuban Revolution from being crushed. Such action must be
independent of the policies of Khrushchev and the Soviet
bureaucracy.

". . . The International Committee of the Fourth International
calls on all its sections to take their place in all actions for the
defense of the Cuban Revolution from the US imperialists.
"Cuba, as a sovereign state, has the right to accept whatever
military aid it decides. But the setting up of Soviet missile bases
* as a substitute for the international working-class struggle
cannot defend the revolution —

"In the advanced countries, especially the USA, the working
class must organize actions in full support of the workers and
peasants of Cuba. End the blockade! End the invasion
preparations!"

Not content merely to rip a phrase out of context,
Lundmark in the true spirit of the SWP falsifies even the
portion he bothers to quote.

Of course, it is easy for the SWP to attack the obviously
contradictory position of the Socialist Labour League
(SLL: Gerry Healy's organization, now the Workers
Revolutionary Party) that Cuba remained capitalist even
after the massive nationalizations in late 1960. The I.C.
position was a mechanical attempt to resist the simple
characterization of Cuba as a workers' state made by the
SWP and the Pabloites. But the KAF leadership feels it is
irrelevant and unnecessary to proceed to a thorough
analysis of what Lundmark calls the "shortcomings" of the
Cuban leadership and [of his statement] that "The
prospects of the development of the Cuban leadership were
overestimated" (Lundmark, p. 2). Whatever one can say
about the Spartacists, it cannot be denied that they have
attempted to analyze this in a way which merits serious
consideration. The correct position that Cuba was
qualitatively a deformed workers' state by the end of 1960
was developed and adopted only by the Revolutionary
Tendency within the SWP (which was to become the
Spartacist tendency).

Rather than "fleeing political discussion" they have
faced the issue of Cuba squarely. It is Lundmark's
document which represents a determined attempt to evade
the question.

The membership of the KAF has a right to answers to the
following questions:

—if you now characterize Cuba as a deformed workers
state, when did it become so? Why? How?

— if the Castro leadership is still characterized as
"revolutionary," does this mean that non-Trotskyist
leaderships can establish genuine workers states (whatever
shortcomings they may have)?

—can there be a non-Trotskyist leadership which is
"revolutionary" in the sense that Trotsky's Fourth
International would have used the term?

We certainly do not claim to be fully familiar with all the
positions of the international Spartacist tendency. How-
ever, even a quick and preliminary examination of their
positions reveals an important falsification in Lundmark's
account of their history.

According to documents published by the Spartacists,
they were willing to remaindisciplined members of the SWP
and USec after the 1963 reunification, even though they
were opposed to reuniting without political clarification of
the central issues which had separated the Pabloite
I nternational Secretariat from Trotskyism for over 1 0 years.

However, the Spartacists were £A'/'£LZ.££)by theSWP;
they did not "depart" as Lundmark claims. They appealed
their expulsion to the 1965 World Congress but were
answered by Pierre Frank:

"We call your attention first of all to the fact that the Fourth
International has no organizational connection with the
Socialist Workers Party and consequently has nojurisdiction
in a problem such as you raise, namely the application of
democratic centralism as it affects the organization either as a
whole or in individual instances."

Comrades, is this a statement the World Party of
Socialist Revolution would have made?

It is not we, but the leadership of the KAF and the USec
which are opposed to a political discussion of their past. It
is the KAF leadership which "flees from political
discussion" by refusing to even attempt to remedy what is
so discreetly called a "weakness" which "should not be
looked upon as a correct principle."

We believe that it is the duty of those who claim to be
Trotskyists today to "reach a common understanding" and
knowledge of the development of the world revolution
after World War II. A "leadership" which refuses to discuss
this question, while admitting having no position on it, can
hardly claim to be Trotskyist.

* * « * *
We consider it a question of principle to be exonerated of
the groundless charges about breaking discipline brought
against us. Therefore we have appeared before the Control
Commission [CC] in a disciplined fashion. It is with
satisfaction that we see that the KAF leadership has been

INTERNATIONAL SPARTACIST
TENDENCY DIRECTORY

LIGUE TROTSKYSTE DE FRANCE

Le Bolchevik, BP 42 109

75424 Paris Cedex 09, France
SPARTACIST LEAGUE/BRITAIN

PC Box 185

London, WC1H 8JE, England
SPARTACIST LEAGUE OF
AUSTRALIA/NEW ZEALAND

GPO Box 3473

Sydney, NSW, 2001, Australia
SPARTACIST LEAGUE/U.S.

Box 1377, GPO

New York, NY 10001, U.S.
SPARTACIST STOCKHOLM

Spartacist Publishing Co.

c/o E. Davidson

Fack

102 60 Stockholm, Sweden
TROTSKYIST LEAGUE OF CANADA

Box 7198, Station A

Toronto, Ontario, Canada
TROTZKISTISCHE LIGA DEUTSCHLANDS '■ TJft

Postfach 1 67 47 ; i.;ja

6000 Frankfurt/Maini, West Germany ■

SUMMER 1978

29

forced to retreat. The CC statement totally exonerates us of
all charges.

Regarding the CC statement (which we demand be
printed in an internal bulletin) that it is "the right of KAF
members to sample and advocate other opinions within the
organization," our rights were not at all that clear a few
months ago.

The answer from the CC is hypocritical; from the very
first moment it was clear that we were threatened with
expulsion because of our political positions and not
because of any possible breach of discipline.

That the international Spartacist tendency (iSt) deserves
the attention of every serious militant is beyond any doubt.
Even comrades from the United Secretariat have been
forced to admit it, as the following quote demonstrates:
"...they have consistently maintained principled positions
on such issues as feminism and nationalism; they have
established a generally commendable record of support for
other left tendencies under attack from the bourgeois state
and have refrained from the use of violence against other left
groupings (itself not a minor achievement in the light of the
record of most other left formations in the U.S.). In a period
in which other ostensibly Trotskyist tendencies have been
characterized by bizarre deviations and hysterical excesses—
from the Posadista call for a preemptive nuclear strike by the
USSR (with socialism rising triumphant from the ashes) to
the shrill 'fascism is -around the corner' clamor of the
American Wohlforthites (coupled with the Healy/ Wohlforth

blatant opportunism and authoritarian party regime)— the
Spartacist League has presented a sober, solid, down-to-
earth tone that is refreshing."

— Spartacist League: Anatomy of a Sect.

Contribution to an Analysis of the American Left.
Education for Socialists by the RMG/Canada

Due to the bankruptcy of the leadership's politics, it
appears impossible to carry on a political debate within the
organization, and as clearly shown by the report on the
work of the Stockholm local [local bulletin no. 61],
demoralized members are now leaving the organization.
And "militants" such as those in the ex-Tendency "C" are
content to maintain an uneasy laissez-faire attitude vis-a
vis the leadership. Under such conditions we believe that
continuing our struggle for a revolutionary internationalist
program requires that we take up discussions with the
international Spartacist tendency.

We believe that all serious KAF militants will face this
same imperative and we urge them to join in such political
discussions and in the reforging of the Fourth
International.
Nacka

22 February 1978

With Trotskyist Greetings

C.

G.

Reply to the KAF Political Bureau

Comrades of the Executive Committee of the PB:

We have received your request that we confirm that the
United Secretariat is Trotskyist, that the USec represents
the continuity of the Fourth International and that we
publicly defend that the USec is Trotskyist against all its
opponents, especially against the international Spartacist
tendency.

We are, have been and will be disciplined members of the
KAF. We recognize unequivocally that the KAF's Central
Committee and Political Bureau are our leading bodies,
likewise that the United Secretariat is the leadingbody of the
Fourth International and that we submit to its discipline.

The purpose of your letter and your questions in this
matter does not lie in seeking our assurance that weare going
to be loyal members of the organization. What you are really
after is our ideas, our attempt to evaluat-e the political
motion, possibilities and development of the KAF: the
organization to which we have belonged for several years
and to which we feel a responsibility both in regard to the
organization as such, and its members.

What you are trying to do is really dishonest. First by
trying to prevent our positions from reaching members of
the KAF ("For a Revolutionary Trade Union Tactic,"
written in May, has not yet been published, nor has "For a
Trotskyist Program," written in November, been published
either internally or in Internationalen).

After that you threaten expulsion solely on the basis of
our political views and our political struggle. As far as we
' know, this is unique in KAF's history.

As you know these bureaucratic maneuvers are not new.
Your administrative and bureaucratic measures are not a
new invention. The technique of placing us on the bench of
the accused, not for any break of discipline but because of
our programmatic ideas, is only reminiscent of the
Bolshevik party's destruction by the Stalin faction and
Pablo's actions in destroying the FI around the time of the
Third World Congress. It ought to be noted that things
went a lot further than most of the well-meaning comrades
in the original Stalinist and Pabloist factions undoubtedly
intended.

Although our case is actually nothing but a form of
witchhunt, we want to try and answer your questions.

In the first place, the Trotskyist program including its
organizational norms is a decisive criterion for an
organization that wants to call itself Trotskyist. This
concerns the program as well as the actions.

What, then, is the USec's organizational relationship to
Trotsky's Fourth International and the Trotskyist pro-
gram? How do we decide this question? The answer to this
is precisely the political discussion which you are trying to
prevent.

Since 1968 the USec has been deeply split. Insofar as the
harsh reality of the class struggle has brought forward clear
political positions, unfortunately different parts of the
USec have found themselves on opposite sides of the
barricades on questions such as Angola, Portugal, their
attitude toward. Eurocommunism, toward the SWP/
USA's demand that the army of the bourgeois state protect
democratic rights, etc.

continued on next page

30

SPARTACIST

Reply to KAF PB...

It is impossible to deny that these viewpoints and
positions flow from a political program (namely centrist and
reformist) and these can hardly be called Trotskyist.
Consequently the least one can do is to put a question mark
after the USec's "Trotskyism."

The leadership of the ex-LTF, the SWP/USA, has a
whole range of reformist viewpoints. That the SWP is
reformist is a view which is shared by a large part of the I MT
leadership including leading comrades in the KAF.
Furthermore, the majority has publicly condemned the
Argentine PST's position of support to the "process of
institutionalization" in Argentina. During 1973-74 IMT
supporters in North America openly described the SWP and
the Canadian LS A as reformist and non-Marxist. When the
Internationalist Tendency was expelled from the SWP
solely because of this opinion the majority protested this
political explusion.

Have the leading comrades of the KAF changed their
views on the explusion of the IT?

The USec majority, to which our section belongs, has
given a whole range of contradictory political answers under
the pressure of different events in the class struggle. There
unquestionably are comrades who honestly support the
Leninist road, but we also have a political leadership which
first is impressionist and secondly is swinging to the right.
The KAF is soft on Eurocommunists, it seeks rotten blocs
with left social democrats and Stalinists in the unions, these
days the KAF even has difficulty in drawing the class line
against the repressive apparatus of the bourgeoisie(to which
the "terrorist affair and the immigrant incidents" attest), etc.

One of the central criteria for the Trotskyist Fourth
International is its organizational norms regarding demo-
cratic centralism.

Has the functioning of the USec ever really been
democratic centralist during the last years? Obviously not!

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We have seen two factions, the IMT and the LTF, which
have constantly publicly criticized each other. We have
^ seen different national sections refuse to abide by the
decisions of the World Congress. In short, the USec doesn't
function as a democratic centralist organization. And isn't
this precisely one of the criteria by which we can
characterize an organization as Trotskyist or not?

The usee's failure to function according to democratic
centralism does not automatically disqualify it as Trotsky-
ist. It does raise a question as to whether or not it can be
called the Fourth International.

It is also a proof of the absolute necessity of the struggle
that we have begun to wage in the KAF.

Your letter seems to put forward the tautological
assertion that the FI is Trotskyist and that for an individual
to say that the U Sec or some section of it is not Trotskyist is
sufficient to call his membership status into question.
Despite this, such statements were made rather frequently
before the Tenth World Congress. A whole wing of the
majority wanted to break with the SWP/USA. Parts of the
LTF characterized the IMT as centrist.

Why do you single us out for our political descriptions
and characterizations that were acceptable before this?
Let us look at what this could lead to in an extreme case.

In hunting after a fusion with parts of the French PSU
under the then-leadership of Michel Pablo, Ernest Mandel
made the following statement in the French paper
Politique Hebdo (10 June 1976) cited in Intercontinental
Press No. 37 (1976).

"What do labels matter? If in the political arena we found
forces that agreed with our strategic and tactical orientation
and which were put off only by our name [Fourth
international] and historical references [Trotsky] we would
drop these things within twenty-four hours."

Apparently for Mandel the question of Trotskyism and
the Fourth International is only a bagatelle. If your
procedures were not merely "sanitary measures," aimed at
getting the KAF congress to expel us, you would

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31

immediately take up the struggle for the Eleventh World
Congress to remove Mandel as the USec's leading
spokesman. Instead of doing this you are making us
scapegoats.

Furthermore, if the characterizations we made of the
SWP and Moreno's PST. which we think that some of you
share, are correct, then we think you should investigate
whether or not they are Trotskyist. You should do this in
order to either adopt their line or denounce it. Instead you
choose to hunt us down.

Finally, you raise the question of the iSt. It is naturally
difficult for us to judge an organization's practice from
afar, but as far as we can tell, the positions of the iSt are
those of Trotskyism, and therefore we feel sympathy and a
commonality with them on some questions. Naturally the
positions of the iSt, like those of the USec or any other
organization, have to be tested in practice.

From that perspective, it seems like the SWP sees the
Spartacist League as a real force in the USA. We think
that the discussion between comrade Pearlman (a former
SL member) and the Spartacist League should be
thoroughly studied by all comrades in the KAF.
Pearlman's document can be found in Intercontinental
Press Nos. 2 1 , 22 ( 1 977) and the Spartacist League's answer
in Workers Vanguard Nos. 168 and 170.

It is scandalous of you to ascribe to us the views of the iSt,
an organization whose practice we know little about, and to
counterpose them to the USec. Not even the Spartacists
themselves claim that they are any "counter"-Fourth
International. They do not claim to be an international in
competition with any other. On theother hand theydoclaim
to uphold the political program of Trotskyism.

The USec has recently been active in trying to regroup
"the left" to its advantage. In the USA and in Sweden [the
USec] has even admitted organizations and individuals
which had political positionssimilartothosewhoatthetime
of the Second World War and Korean War quit the Fourth
International and betrayed its program. We are talking
about so-called state capitalists like the RMC in the SWP

racist attacks-^

Workers Vanguard

Once critical of the American SWP's reformist policy
of preaching reliance on capitalist state, the KAF now
chastises the Swedish state for failing to intervene on
behalf of harassed immigrants and political refugees
W|io are denied asylum.

and the so-called study group or "Tendency D" in KAF.

You seek to counterpose yourselves to an organization
which sees itself as orthodox Trotskyist and which shares
many fundamental progrgmmatic positions with critical
left comrades in the USec. An organization which shares
our position against the opportunist leadership of the
USec— a leadership which accepts into membership those
who call the defense of the Soviet Union into question and
who in fact oppose defending the deformed and degenerat-
ed workers states against imperialist attack. You dissociate
yourselves from an organization which wages a principled
fight for a proletarian and not petty-bourgeois line in the
class struggle.

If the KAF was the genuine and Trotskyist organization
that it claims to be, then it should take up discussions with
the iSt, if for no other reason than to politically unmask
them. But why not investigate the possibilities for
principled fusion? And not, as is now the case, put a
Spartacist crown of thorns on our heads.

One of the things that we found positive about the iSt is
that at the time of the 1963 reunification congress (when a
lot of work was done to bring the so-called Healyites and
Lambertistes into the USec) they were prepared to
participate in this reunification. This can be seen clearly
from their various publications. Instead they were met by
bureaucratic maneuvers and expulsion, no doubt an
attempt to destroy them. This did not succeed and
furthermore the iSt now is a small but nevertheless
international current, while not claiming to be in
organizational competition with the USec.

It seems to us that the leadership of the KAF is now
reproducing a similar process in trying to expel us before
the congress. Comrades, why do you want your bureau-
cratic maneuvers to prove (by expelling us) what we are
trying to prove, namely, that the KAF and the USec are
neither Trotskyist nor the Fourth International. These are
political questions which have to be solved by an open
political debate and not by bureaucratic expulsions. A
debate which you are using administrative measures to
prevent.

You can be sure that as long as we are members of KAF
and the USec, we will unequivocally defend their positions
in public (including against the representatives of the
international Spartacist tendency). At the same time we
assure you that we are going to continue to struggle for
Trotskyist unity in a genuine democratic, as well as
centralist, international organization.

With comradely greetings,
Christer F.
Gunilla S.

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32

SPARTACIST

SUMMER 1978

Swedish USec Face to Face
with Trotskyism

"Like alchemists of the old days, they are looking for the
saving formula," Christer F. told a recent Spartacist public
meeting in Stockholm, Sweden. Comrade Christer was
talking about the centrist Kommunistiska Arbetarforbun-
det (KAF — Communist Workers League), Swedish section
of the United Secretariat (USec), of which he had been a
long-time member before finally rejecting the USec's brand
of get-rich-quick opportunism and solidarizing with the
principled Trotskyist politics of the international Spartacist
tendency (iSt). Comrade Christer recounted the story of his
oppositional struggle in the rightward-moving KAF, which
culminated at the KAF national congress last December
with the KAF leadership's hilariously ineffectual efforts to
railroad him and a cothinker, Comrade Gunilla, out of the
organization.

It all began when the two left oppositionists submitted a
document, "For a Trotskyist Program," in November
during the pre-conference discussion period. Though
centrists must be professional confusionists and abhor
above all any attempt at programmatic clarity, the furor
unleashed by the document is explicable only in terms of the
precarious internal situation of the KAF. The USec's uneasy
truce between the former International Majority Tendency
(IMT) of Ernest Mandel and the faction led politically by the
reformist American Socialist Workers Party (SWP) has
been dutifully carried out in Sweden through the disman-
tling of Tendencies A and B. But disgust with the social-
democratic SWP has not been fully expunged from the
ranks of the KAF, which has historically been rather leftist
within the USec spectrum. Thus the two oppositionists were
heaping salt on still-open wounds when they wrote:

"Today the KAF assists in spreading illusions about the
bourgeois state. The bourgeois state and its repressive appa-
ratus are charged with failure to intervene on behalf of
immigrants who are harassed, political refugees who are

turned away, and 'terrorists' who are sent packing The

Malmo local called for better behavior on the part of cops in
connection with attacks on immigrants (Internationalen, 12
August 1977).

"This is indeed different from a few years back when the KAF
protested against the SWP as the latter put forward the
demand that police/military troops should be sent in todefend
(sic!) blacks in Boston."

— "For a Trotskyist Program"

The document also castigated the USec for increasingly
open abandonment of the Trotskyist principle of uncondi-
tional defense of the Soviet Union against imperialism:
"Defense of the Soviet Union is abandoned — evidently it is
acceptable these days to endorseappeals with Maoists and the
bourgeoisie aimed directly against the deformed and
degenerated workers states. The SWP is even permitted to
fuse with a state capitalist grouping without protest from any
leading organ."

In Sweden, a country which directly faces the Soviet Union
across the Baltic Sea (the nearest major city to Stockholm is
Leningrad), this is certainly no abstract question. The
oppositionists nbted that the cadres who founded the KAF
in 1971 had been gained largely from the sizable Swedish

M aoist groups through the posing of Trotskyist positions on
such questions as the class nature of the Soviet Union.

The left critics' insistence on discussing the differences
between the pro-IMT and pro-SWP wings of the USec was
certainly galling to the KAF leadership, which has tried to
relegate them to the status of "merely historical" disputes
(the USec's equation of "historical" with unimportant itself
speaks volumes). But an even more sensitive subject raised
by Christer and Gunilla was the question of the KAFs
foundering trade-union work. After the dissolution of
Tendencies A and B, a workerist current. Tendency C,
remained to plague the KAF leadership's dreams of internal
peace. Though this current was far from possessing a
coherent critical analysis of KAF trade-union work, its
formation reflected uneasiness within the organization over
the K AF's turn from "putting the union up against the wall"
to attempts to become a pressure group on the union
bureaucracy, often through forming propaganda blocs with
left social democrats or Stalinists. "For a Trotskyist
Program," with its insistence that "KAF should have
communists in the trade unions and not trade unionists in
continued on page 25

For panyttfodelsen av
Fjarde Internationalenl

Dokument frin

den trotskistiska oppositionens kamp i KAF

Spartacist Publishing Co.
c/o E. Davidson

Pack SPARTACIST STOCKHOLM

102 60 Stockholm Sympatisbrgrupp till internationella

Sweden Spartacist tendensen

SPARTAOST

NUMBER 26

WINTER 1979

50 CENTS

Where
Pabloism
Has Led
the GIIVI....10

Statement of the

Internationalist

Communists

of Buchenwald....12

2 SPARTACIST

EURO-
REVISIONISIS

TiUL
STAUNIST
BREAKJnMIKVS

As a revolutionary leader he is worse than worthless. But
as a political weathervane he is almost unerring. Yes,
Ernest Mandel, that internationally renowned guru of the
fake-Trotskyist United Secretariat of the Fourth interna-
tional (USec), certainly is a master at bending with the
shifting political winds in the European left.

During the heyday of New Left adventurism Mandel
presented the USec as the true embodiment of the heritage
of "Che." Along comes the pre-revolutionary crisis in
Portugal and Mandel was to be found providing a left
cover for the arch-Stalinist Portuguese Communist Party
(PCP) of Alvaro Cunhal. And when Eurocommunism
replaced Portugal in the headlines Mandel became the self-
appointed lawyer for that arch-enemy of the Kremlin-loyal
Cunhal: premier Eurocommunist Santiago Carrillo of the
Spanish Communist Party (PCE)!

Such posturing might be regarded as a farcical burlesque
if it weren't so positively obscene. Here is Mandel
eulogizing "Che" on the tenth anniversary of his murder
while at the same time prettifying the Eurocommunists,
who truly hate the memory of Guevara because the
martyred guerrilla still remains an inspiration to their "far
left" opponents. One wonders whether the consummately

cynical Mandel even felt a twinge of shame when Italian
Communist Party (PCI) leader Paolo Bufalini told the PCI
central committee: "I would have given Guevara a medal
for heroism and simultaneously condemned him to death
for indiscipline" (quoted in Manchester Guardian Weekly,
7 May 1978). That's how the Scheidemanns and Noskes of
Italy today pay tribute to the idealist Stalinist adventurer
uncritically lionized by the Mandelites.

But Guevara is dead now, as are many of the subjectively
revolutionary Latin American youth who tragically
followed the line of the professor from the Louvain and
actually "picked up the gun." There is a cynical adage from
American courtroom parlance which applies to Mandel:
the lawyer always goes home.

Mandelite tailing after Eurocommunism did not fall out
of the sky. The shift from enthusing over the heroic
adventurism of a "Che" to apologizing for the pro-
imperialist parliamentary cretinism of the Eurocommu-
nists is consistent with Mandel's twenty-five year history of
Pabloist impressionism on the question of Stalinism. This
liquidationist revisionism which organizationally de-
stroyed the Fourth International in 1953 was succinctly
stated (a rare virtue for the Pabloists, who clothe their

WINTER 1979

3

abrogation of Marxism in bombast) in a document entitled
"The Rise and Decline uf Stalinism" which the Pabloist
"International Secretariat" adopted at its rump "Fourth
World Congress" in 1954:

"In countries where the CPs are a majority in the working
class, they can, in certain exceptional conditions (ad-
vanced disintegration of the possessing classes) and under
the pressure of very powerful revolutionary uprisings of
the masses, be led to project a revolutionary orientation
counter to the Kremlin's directives, without abandoning
the political and theoretical baggage inherited from
Stahnism This perspective — namely not an organiza-
tional disintegration of the mass Communist parties, but
rather a disintegration, molecular for an entire period, of
the bureaucratic relations which extend from the Kremlin
down to the ranks of these parties — is essential for
determining the forms of intervention by our movement in
this proces.s in order to make it evolve in a direction
favorable to revolutionary Marxism."

— reprinted in The Development and

Disintegration of World Stalinism. Socialist
Workers Party (SWP) "Education for Socialists"
Bulletin (March 1970)

The "forms of intervention" have indeed varied: from
deep entrism into the mass reformist parties of Western
Europe during the 1950'sand 1960's, to the futile search for
the elusive "new mass vanguard" outside of the "bureau-
cratic apparatuses" of the workers movement following the
1968 May events in France, to attempting to broker a lash-
up of the "far left" that could act as a left pressure group on
the popular front. But the thrust continues to be
liquidationism: to find a substitute for the proletariat
organized by its conscious vanguard under the banner of
the Fourth International in resolving the crisis of
revolutionary leadership.

In the past the Pabloists have tailed those Stalinist
bureaucrats, whether in Havana, Hanoi or Lisbon, who
could be portrayed cynically as resolute opponents of U.S.
imperialism. But with their positive orientation to
Eurocommunism the Mandelites are now tailing CP tops
who desire to break down barriers to Washington.
Mandel's endless maneuvers aimed at conjuring up a "new
mass vanguard" lead him to follow the shift to the right in
radical petty-bourgeois opinion. Thus the Mandelites have
crawled back to the "bureaucratic apparatuses" which they
spurned only yesterday; and from there to tailing popular

frontism and becoming apologists for the pro-NATO
Berlinguer, the pro-monarchist Carrillo, and the \)xo-fone
de frappe Marchais.

Arising in the context of the anti-Soviet "human rights"
offensive of U.S. imperialism, Eurocommunism represents
the attempts of the CP leaderships to prove both to their
"own" bourgeoisies and to Washington that they can be
entrusted with ministerial portfolios and seats in the
councils of NATO. These parties' much-touted "independ-
ence" from Moscow and their shedding of even the
pretenses of Marxist and Leninist phraseology (to which
they decreasingly paid lip service) clearly represent shifts to
the right by the major mass Communist parties of Western
Europe. The European-based USec majority must there-
fore discern some kind of "progressive dynamic" in the
thoroughly reformist parties which betrayed the French
strikes of 1968 and the Italian strike wave of the following
year.

The emergence of Eurocommunism has provided a
rallying point for diverse political tendencies with appetites
to pressure the CPs from the left and from the right.
Mandel has obvious opportunist appetites to broker a
grand regroupment of left social democrats and pro-
Eurocommunists — all along appealing to the "far left" to
join his fake "Fourth International" and get in on the
action. His scheme was quite clearly revealed last May
when the French Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire
(LCR), mainstay of the Mandelite USec majority, hosted a
big fete featuring French Communist Party (PCF)
historian Jean Elleinstein, French Socialist Party leader
Gilles Martinet, an official delegation from Carrillo's
Spanish Communist Party, Ukrainian dissident Leonid
Plyushch and two so-called "progressive" officers, a retired
French general and an admiral. Admiral Sanguinetti, who
ran in the March elections on the SP ticket, defended
French colonial butchery in Indochina and Algeria and
praised the "democracy" of Hitler's Wehrmacht! Of course,
on this platform the LCR kept mum about such
fundamental Trotskyist positions as class opposition to
popular fronts and unconditional defense of the Soviet
Union. Instead, LCR spokesman Bensaid concentrated his
remarks on echoing the attacks of the Eurocommunists on
the "model of the Soviet revolution" and posting the
continued on next page

A

Mandel (left)
demagogically claims that
Carrillo (right) "completely
rehabilitates" Andres Nin,
the Spanish POUM leader
murdered by the Stalinists.
In fact, Carrillo condemns
Nin's role in the
Barcelona May Days as
"an act of treason."

4

SPARTACIST

"cohabitation" of the "democratic" institutions of bour-
geois dictatorship with "proletarian democracy" after the
revolution.

Capitulation to the popular front has led the Mandelites
to orient toward the rightist currents in Western European
Stalinism as well as their social-democratic would-be allies.
"Euro-Trotskyism" — as the Mandelite line was so aptly
dubbed by that Spanish prophet of Eurocommunism,
Fernando Claudin, at the May LCR fete — represents a
significant social-democratization of the USec majority. Its
adaptation to Eurocommunism put the centrist Mandelites
on a rightist, anti-Soviet course which led to a genuine
though limited narrowing of differences with its main
factional opponent within the USec, the viscerally social-
democratic American Socialist Workers Party (SWP).

To date the most synthetic presentation of the USec
majority's line on Eurocommunism is the recent book by
Mandel entitled From Stalinism to Eurocommunism
(1978). Its key chapter is "Three Facets of Eurocommu-
nism." which first appeared as an article in the Mandelite
international journal Inprecor (its English-language
edition now "incorporated" into the Intercontinental Press
of the SWP).

In this article Mandel musters his quite considerable
powers of obfuscation to portray Eurocommunism as a
phenomenon whose basic political character remains to be
determined but which is pregnant with revolutionary
possibilities. Eurocommunism is here described as a
"contradictory" phenomenon. But Mandel does no/ mean
contradictory in the sense used by Trotsky, namely, that
with their decisive passage into the camp of reformism in
1933 the CPs became bourgeois workers parties not
qualitatively different from the Social Democracy.

Rather, Mandel portrays Eurocommunism as
contradictory in the sense of political schizophrenia. It
supposedly has three "facets"; one is not so good, but the
other two are fraught with revolutionary implications. In
relation to their own imperialist bourgeoisies the Eurocom-
munist parties are said to be moving to the right. But with
regard to the Soviet bloc and their own restive ranks
Mandei claims that Eurocommunism is a progressive,
' indeed even "objectively revolutionary," force.

Of course, Mandel cannot deny that the Eurocommu-

nists are seeking an ever greater integration within their
"own" bourgeois order. His article begins on a seemingly
orthodox Trotskyist note: "More than anything else
Eurocommunism represents a codification of the right-
ward evolution of the West European Communist parties
since the Seventh Congress of the Comintern." Moreover,
he admits that "the decisive factor" motivating the CP
lead,erships is the attempt "to overcome parliamentary
isolation, and to link up with Social Democracy and the
'liberal' bourgeoisie."

But for Mandelite "dialectics" there are two sides to
every contradiction: that which exists in reality and that
which exists as an objectification of opportunist appetite.
Thus this high priest of Pabloism writes:

"From the historical standpoint, however, Eu-
rocommunism is not simply a confirmation of the
(further) rightward turn of most of the West European
Communist parties, it also represents a right turn under
particular conditions, new in and of themselves. First, it is
occurring during a period of rising and sometimes stormy
upsurge of mass struggles in Southern Europe, which has
bordered on pre-revolutionary and revolutionary situa-
tions." [emphasis added]

But "from the historical standpoint" popular frontism was
precisely a product of "rising and sometimes stormy" class
polarizations and conflicts. What were the "particular
conditions" prevailing in Spain and France in the mid-
I930's, and in Italy and France immediately after World
War II, if not "stormy"?

What Mandel seeks to obscure Fs that Eurocommunism
is the product of the defeats and betrayals of the
"sometimes stormy upsurge of mass struggles in Southern
Europe," especially Portugal. And here Chile should be
added where even Mandel is forced to acknowledge in
"Three Facets" that for the Eurocommunists:

"The old 'wisdom' of Social Democracy was affirmed:
avoid a comprehensive test of strength with the bourgeoi-
sie. When the exacerbation of class contradictions and the
polarization of political forces in the context of a pre-
revolutionary situation leads to such a test of strength,
then the political conclusion drawn from this 'wisdom' is
simple: curb the mobilization of the workers, even if this
divides the toilers and demobilizes entire layers of the
proletariat. The successful application of this line can lead
only to the victory of counter-revolution."

The fall of Allende convinced Berlinguer's PCI that the
Chilean Popular Unity government had been "too radical"
and had too narrow a base of bourgeois support. So the
Italian Stalinists rejected seeking a popular front with a
liberal minority of their own bourgeoisie in favor of a
coalition with the dominant ruling-class party, the
staunchly anti-Soviet, pro-American Christian Demo-
crats. Moreover, Berlinguer's party recognized that the
final arbiter of the "historic compromise" resided not in
Rome but in Washington. Hoping to forestall an Italian
Pinochet, the PCI decided it should not bid for direct
governmental participation without first securing the
support or at least the benign neutrality of American
imperialism.

Portugal in the spring and summer of 1975 was the
sharpest, most important conflict between Stalinism and
Social Democracy in Western Europe since the height of
the Cold War in the 1950's. After the Armed Forces
Movement (MFA) toppled the right-wing Caetano
dictatorship in the spring of 1974, Cunhal's PCP pursued a
policy of support to left-nationalist military bonapartism.

WINTER 1979

5

At the height of the prerevolutionary crisis in Portugal the Mandelites tailed the left- talking section of the
bonapartist bourgeois officer caste (left), while the SWP reformists cheered the anti-Communist
mobilizations spearheaded by the Portuguese social democrats who were funded by the CIA (right).

When Mario Soares' Socialist Party won a large plurality
in the April 1975 Constituent Assembly elections, it
demanded a strong government led by itself to suppress the
conditions of "anarchy." In order to stay in power the left-
MFA/PCP Fifth Provisional Government was forced at
the time to tolerate the workers commissions, neighbor-
hood commissions and soldiers committees. In the summer
of 1975 Soares' Socialists, fully and actively backed by U.S.
imperialism and West European Social Democracy,
moved to overthrow the Fifth Provisional Government in
order to suppress these embryos of dual power and to eject
the pro-Moscow PCP from office.

The increasingly violent conflict between Soares'
Socialists and CunhaTs Communists produced a deep rift
in the European Stalinist movement. The Italian and
Spanish CP leaderships were greatly upset when the left-
M FA/ PCP regime did not turn power over to the social
democrats after the latter won the Constituent Assembly
elections; moreover, they were embarrassed by the
ideological Justification for this course coming out of
Lisbon and Moscow. The founding document of
Eurocommunism — the joint statement of principles by
Berlinguer's PCI and Carrillo's PCE in July 1975— was
expressly designed to dissociate these parties from
CunhaPs PCP and its Kremlin backers.

Unlike the Italian and Spanish CPs, Marchais' PCF was
sufficiently conservative to defend Cunhal, a stance that
proved quite damaging to its popular-front politics in
France. The French Communists came under heavy fire
from their popular-front partners for their line on
Portugal; for a time this issue even threatened to split the
Union of the Left.

Just as Berlinguer learned from the 1973 Chilean coup
that the PC! should ally with the dominant bourgeois
party, so Marchais drew the lesson from the fall of the left-
M FA/ PCP regime in September 1975 that the PCF could
not extend its influence in opposition to a strong social-
democratic party, behind which stood U.S. imperialism, in
November Marchais journeyed to Rome where he and
Berlinguer issued a declaration of principles similar to the
PCl/PCE statement in July. CunhaPs hapless fate pushed

Marchais into the Eurocommunist camp.

Just as the incipient civil war in Portugal deeply
polari/ed the world Stalinist movement, so it almost split
the USec into its main component parts: the Mandelite
centrists and the reformist SWP. Characteristically, the
USec majority tailed the left-bonapartist/Stalinist bloc.
The Mandelite Liga Comunista Internacionalista went
so far that in August of 1975 it signed a formal agreement
supporting the program of the Fifth Provisional Govern-
ment, in effect entering a short-lived popular front with the
left-MFA/PCP regime.

On the other side, no event revealed the social-
democratic, anti-communist nature of the American SWP
more starkly than the 1975 Portuguese crisis. In the name
of "defending democracy" the SWP cheered the CIA-
funded Socialists as they spearheaded the rightist mobiliza-
tion against the Stalinists, the "far left" and the embryos of
revolutionary dual power. The SWP's "State Department
socialist" line on Portugal was a key factor in its fusion with
continued on next page

SPARTAOST

(Fourth Internationalist)
An Organ of Revolutionary Marxism

EDITORIAL BOARD: Charles O'Brien (managing), Susan Adrian,
Elizabeth Gordon. William Logan, James Robertson, Joseph Seymour,
John Sharpe, David Strachan
PRODUCTION MANAGER: Noah Wilner
CIRCULATION MANAGER: Karen Wyatt

Published for the Interim Secretariat of the international Spartacist
tendency, in accord with the "Declaration for the Organizing of an
International Trotskyist Tendency, " by the Spartacist Publishing
Company, Box 1377, GPO, New York, N Y 10001. Telephone: 966-6841

Opinions expressed in signed articles or letters do not necessarily
express the editorial viewpoint.

Number 26

Winter 1979

6

SPARTACIST

the Shachtmanite anti-Soviet-defensist Revolutionary
Marxist Committee in 1977. The positions of the
Mandelites and SWP on Portugal in 1975 would literally
have placed them on opposite sides of the barricades.

Terminological Chicanery

Although Mandel speaks about the "social
democratization" of the West European CPs, his actual
purpose is to argue that the Eurocommunist parties stand
to the left of the present-day social-democratic parties. In
the first essay of his book Mandel puts his cards on the
table for all to see:

"But we have never said that the Communist parties are in
the process of being transformed into the miserable Social
Democracy of Helmut Schmidt, Wilson-Healey-
Callaghan, or Mario Scares. What we have underscored
are the evident parallels with the evolution of classical
Social Democracy of 1910-30, which should not be
confused with contemporary Social Democracy."

The deliberate confusionism in this passage is so many-
sided, it is difficult to sort out. To begin with, the
periodization of "classic Social-Democracy" from 1910 to
1930 is sheer invention on Mandel's part. The social-
democratic movement underwent no definitive change in
1910 or in 1930. It did, however, undergo a qualitative
change in 1914 with the outbreak of World War I, when the
International fragmented into hostile, social-patriotic
parties.

As Mandel well knows, the Leninist-Trotskyist tradition
regards pre-World War I Social Democracy as a centrist
current vacillating between revolutionary and reformist
politics. To assert that Eurocommunism is analogous to
early Social Democracy is equivalent to asserting that these
parties are centrist.

By identifying Eurocommunism with Social Democracy
in the period from 1910 to 1930 Mandel avoids dealing with
the question of the popular front. However, a decade
before Kautsky formulated what Mandel portrays as the
doctrinal forerunner of Eurocommunism, classic Social
Democracy indeed confronted "popular frontism" in the
form of Millerandism. When in 1899 the French Socialist

Der Spiegel

French Pabloists yearn for a return to the halcyon
days of the Union of the Left.

Under slogan calling for "Victory of the Entire
Left' Pabloists are billed with the MRG, the
bourgeois Left Radicals.

Alexandre Millerand entered a bourgeois cabinet, he
anticipated the principal expression of reformism in the
imperialist epoch in bourgeois-democratic countries with
mass parties based on the labor movement. After an initial
softness toward Millerandism, the Bebel/ Kautsky leader-
ship of German Social Democracy definitely rejected
socialist participation in a capitalist government.

in his 1908 book The Road jo Power Kautsky stated:
"Whoever looks upon the Socialist party as a means of
freeing the proletariat, must decisively oppose any and all
forms of participation by that party in the ruling
corruption. If there is anything that will rob us of the
confidence of all honorable elements in the masses, and
that will gain us the contempt of all those sections of the
proletariat that are capable of and willing to fight, and that
will bar the road to our progress, it is participation of the
Socialists in any coalition or 'bloc' policy."

This passage marks pre- War Kautskyism on the question
of socialist entry into bourgeois governments as qualita-
tively to the left of fl// Stalinist parties since \ 934-}5 and the
USec majority!

Since 1934-35 the Stalinist parties have not been
intrinsically (as distinct from conjuncturally) to the left of
the social-democratic parties. As Trotsky wrote after the
Seventh (Popular Front) Congress of the Comintern in
1935: "Nothing now distinguishes the Communists from
the Social Democrats except the traditional phraseology,
which is not difficult to unlearn" ("The Comintern's
Liquidation Congress," Writings, 1935-36). In the Spanish
Revolution and Civil War ( 1936-37) the Stalinists stood on
the far right wing of the "popular front" coalition as the
most implacable enemies of proletarian dual power. In
1937 the Stalinists toppled the popular Socialist leader
Largo Caballero because he was insufficiently ruthless in
suppressing the revolutionary workers led by the anarchists
and the centrist POUM.

And Spain was not unique in this regard. As Mandel
himself noted, in 1945 the Kremlin and its British followers
advocated that the Labour Party continue its wartime
coalition with Churchilfs Tories. Clement Attlee and
Ernest Bevin rejected this Stalinist line. Within the

WINTER 1979

7

framework of reformism the British Labour government of
1945-51. which nationalized a number of major industries
and introduced socialized medicine, was far to the left of
the present-day Italian Communist Party, whose program
of economic austerity and "law and order" aims at
reversin}^ the economic gains made by the working class
since the "red autumn" of 1969 and strengthening the
repressive state apparatus. On key issues in Italian political
life (the 1974 divorce referendum, the Moro kidnapping)
Berlinguer's PC! has been to the right of the Socialist Party
of De Martino/Craxi. Likewise, in the Chilean Unidad
Popular government the CP constituted the far-right-wing
defender of the bourgeois order.

By the time Mandel finishes dealing with the first "facet,"
Eurocommunism comes off looking not all that bad. Then
Mandel settles down to saying what he really wants to say:
since Eurocommunism has aroused illusions in the West
European and to a certain extent East European working
class and among intellectuals, therfore it is more potent and
relevant than Trotskyism. Mandel maintains that when
they criticize the Kremlin and make noises about workers
democracy, the Eurocommunists are not making overtures
to their own bourgeoisie or to U.S. imperialism but in fact
are responding to pressure from the proletariat. It is a
classic case of the prophet pretending that it's the mountain
and not himself that's doing the moving.

Here then is the key passage in "Three Facets" and
indeed in the entire book From Stalinism lo
Eurocommunism:

"As we have already shown, the main reasons for the
tactical turns of the Eurocommunists during past years
have related to electoral policy: the aim is to overcome a
specific obstacle to reaching voters (and trade-union
sympathizers to some extent). From this standpoint, the
Eurocommunists' criticism of the repressive policies of the
Soviet bureaucracy can in no way be designed to win

bourgeois or 'upper middle class' votes In other words:

the growing criticism of the Soviet bureaucracy is a
concession primarily to the West European working class
itself and not to the bourgeoisie

"Under these conditions[of militancy in the CP ranks], the
Eurocommunists' criticism of the Kremlin is in large part
not a concession to bourgeois ideology and influence
within the working class, but a concession to ihe anti-
i^ureauciaiic components of tlie average consciousness of
tlie conit)ative lavers of \vorl<ers. which is now undoubted-
ly much stronger than it was in the past." [emphasis in
original]

To begin, one is struck with how Eurocommunism,
which had just been described as the latest stage in the
"gradual social democratization" of the CPs, suddenly gets
reduced to mere "tactical turns" adopted to "overcome a
specific obstacle to reaching voters." But most astounding
is how Mandel flatly denies that the Eurocommunists'
criticism of Soviet bureaucratism and repression of
dissidents has anything to do with their enthusing over
"pluralistic democracy."

Berlingucr. Marchais and Carrillo are not such
parliamcntarx cretins to really believe that their gaining
entry into the government simply requires an electoral
bootstrap operation. Berlinguer doesn't need to back the
Charter 77 group in Czechoslovakia to hold his working-
class constituency. He does so to gain the votes, as it were,
of the Christian Democratic leadership, the Vatican
hierarchy, the Italian general staff and last but not least the
U.S. State Department and I'entagon.

Social democrats and liberals always talk about the
"democratization" of Soviet society, a soft formulation of
the call for capitalist restoration in the USSR. Does this
mean that Willy Brandt or George McGovern are
responding to the "anti-bureaucratic components of the
average consciousness of the combative layers of workers"?
Even at the height of the Cold War no American leader—
not Truman, not Eisenhower, not Dulles — openly advocat-
ed reestablishing the "free enterprise system" in Stalinist
Russia. The popular ideological slogans of imperialist anti-
Sovietism have always been "democracy versus dictator-
ship," "the free world versus totalitarianism," "human
rights versus police state repression."

The hostility toward the USSR among American, West
German or British workers is not based on positive loyalty
to the capitalist economic system, on a desire to see General
Motors, Siemens or Imperial Chemical take over Russian
industry. The anti-Soviet attitude of social-democratic
workers in Western Europe and the more backward

Karl

Kautsky:
formally
to the left
of both the
Euro-
Communists
and the
usee
on key
question of
whether
socialists
can make
electoral
blocs with
the class
enemy.

workers in the U.S. in part derives from the belief that
parliamentary democracy is better than the Kremlin's
dictatorial regime and in part from nationalist ideology.
Everyone, except a few right-wing neanderthals, knows
that the West European working classes can only be rallied
behind NATO against the Soviet Union in the name of
"socialist democracy," now including its Eurocommunist
version.

A Basket Full of Dissidents

ff Portugal forced the West European CPs to choose
between Kremlin-loyalism and social democracy, then
the August 1975 Helsinki Conference on Security and
Cooperation in Europe provided the concrete link between
Eurocommunism, U.S. imperialism and the Soviet
dissidents. Especially important in this regard was the so-
called "Basket Three" agreement, the pledge of various
cominiiecl on next page

8

SPARTACIST

democratic rights (free movement of ideas, information,
persons) which U.S. imperialism extracted from the
Kremlin in return for formally recognizing the latter's
sphere of influence in East Europe.

American policymakers like Kissinger had a dual
purpose in pressuring the Soviet Stalinist bureaucracy to
commit itself to "Basket Three." Since the Kremlin would
obviously not carry out "Basket Three," the U.S. could
exploit this in mobilizing "democratic" public opinion for
its drive to ultimately reconquer the USSR for capitalism.

Secondly, Washington strategists hoped (though
probably didn't expect) that "Basket Three" would
would encourage the
development of a pro-
Western oppositional
movement in the USSR,
composed of types like
Andrei Sakharov. In
fact, U.S. imperialism
did succeed in establish-
ing the organizational
framework for the
mainstream soviet dissi-
dent movement in the
form of the Helsinki
monitoring groups.

Especially because
the Soviet government
signed the Helsinki Ac-
cords as a symbol of
detente, the West Eu-
ropean CPs' willingness
to criticize Soviet viola-
tions of "Basket Three"
freedoms became a key
imperialist yardstick for
measuring their inde-
pendence from Mos-
cow. Most of the promi-
nent Soviet dissidents whom the Eurocommunists defend
are involved in the Helsinki monitoring groups. In one
sense the Italian, French and Spanish CPs have become
Helsinki monitoring groups for the Helsinki monitoring
groups.

The Helsinki Accords, linking detente to bougeois-
democratic rights, shaped the very terminology of
Eurocommunism. Thus, the November 1975 PCi/PCF
statement of principles repeats in large measure the "Basket
Three" agreement. The document coming out of the June
1976 East Berlin conference of European Communist
parties, essentially a concession by the Kremlin to the
Eurocommunists, reads very much like the Helsinki
Accords, a paean to detente.

Eurocommunist spokesmen constantly link their
criticisms of the Kremlin to professions of loyalty to their
own and to other "democratic" imperialist states. For
example, in a famous interview with Corriere della Sera in
1976 Berlinguer explicitly linked his opposition to Kremlin
repression, in particular its invasion of Czechoslovakia, to
his desire to build a "socialism with a human face" under
the aegis of NATO. Asked whether "socialism with
freedom is more achievable in the Western system than in
the Eastern one," Berlinguer replied quite bluntly: "Yes,

Finlayson/Fortune

Eurocommunists appease NATO hoping to avoid the fate of
Dubcek.

certainly; the Western system offers fewer constraints"
{Italian Communist. April-July 1976).

In 1977 when the PCF changed its line and came out for a
French independent "nuclear deterrent," Marchais
reasserted his Eurocommunist independence of Soviet
Russia: "If there were aggression against France by the
Soviet Union, which is unthinkable, we would be the first
to defend the national territory" {New York Times, 24
September 1977). Does Mandel believe that Marchais'
statement of anti-Soviet French-defensism is "a con-
cession to the anti-bureaucratic components of the
average consciousness of the combative layers Qf
workers"? We don't
know, for in the 200
pages of From Stalinism
to Eurocommunism this
well-known statement
by Marchais is not
mentioned, nor are simi-
lar embarassing (for
Mandel) statements by
other Eurocommunist
leaders.

Carrillo, in particu-
lar embarrassing (for
way to laud Carter's
"human rights" cam-
paign. When the PCE
was legalized in April
1 977, Carrillo attributed
this to the moral influ-
ence of Carter's "hu-
man rights" campaign.
And again, when Mr.
Eurocommunism visit-
ed the U.S. in the fall of
1977, he thanked Carter
for his right to speak
freely in America, obvi-
' ously implying a contrast with his treatment in Russia.
After crossing a campus workers picket line Carrillo began
a speech at Yale University: "If I'm speaking here today, it
is essentially due to the human rights policies of president
Carter which made possible this visit" (quoted in
L' Espresso. 27 November 1977).

But undoubtedly the most striking instance of
Eurocommunist support to Carter's anti-Soviet "human
rights" campaign was the Shcharansky case last July.
Unlike the Soviet dissidents Yuri Orlov and Aleksander
Ginzburg. who were tried at the same time, Anatoly
Shcharansky actually was guilty of a crime against the
military defense of the Soviet Union. He gave information
about secret military research to an American journalist
connected with Pentagon intelligence agencies (a fact
subsequently admitted by the Pentagon and the liberal
media).

Carter chose to make the Soviet prosecution of
Shcharansky a casus belli in his renewed Cold War
olTensivc. fhe West European CPs duly took their cue
from Washington. The PCI protested the prosecution of
Shcharansky on the front page of L'Unitd. But Marchais
went even further. In a mass demonstration in Paris,
French Communist leaders marched arm-in-arm with

WINTER 1979

9

Avital Shcharansky, an extreme right-wing Zionist
associated with the fanatical, fascistic Gush Emunim sect in
Israel. At this demonstration a Soviet flag was burned and
among the slogans carried was "Hitler, Stalin, Brezhnev,
the Same Struggle." PCF central committee member Henri
Fis/bin explained his party's participation in this anti-
Soviet demonstration as a "reaffirmation of our passionate
attachment to democracy, not only in France but anywhere
in the world" (Le Monde, 13 July 1978).

If Mandel portrays the Eurocommunist defense of
Soviet bloc dissidents as progressive, it is because he would
have us believe that all oppositional movements in the
Soviet bloc are progressive, forces for political revolution
against the Stalinist bureaucracy:

"The political conflict in the USSR and the People's
Democracies pits the bureaucracy against the toiling
masses and not against the imperialist bourgeoisie. When
the Eurocommunist leaders commit themselves (insuffi-
ciently) against the bureaucracy in this struggle, they place
themselves on the side of the masses and not on the side of
imperialism."

Is the reactionary religious fanatic Aleksander Solzhe-
nitsyn, who denounces the American people for not
destroying North Vietnam, then a legitimate spokesman
for "the toiling masses against the bureaucracy"? What
about the liberal cold warrior Andrei Sakharov, who calls
for U.S. economic blackmail against the Soviet Union? Or
the Zionist Vladimir Slepak, who sought to organize the
large-scale emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel?

It is empirically indisputable that the mainstream Soviet
dissidents look to Western imperialism as a champion of
their cause. As previously noted, most of the Soviet
dissidents defended by the West European CPs were
involved in the Helsinki monitoring groups. In its
documents written for internal consumption the USec
concedes that the opposition to Stalinist bureaucratic rule
in the Soviet bloc contains reactionary elements. Yet the
USec explicitly denies that even the pro-imperialist
dissidents represent a current that poses a danger to the
gains of the collectivized economies of these states.
According to the draft resolution which the Mandelites
have drawn up for their "Eleventh World Congress,"

"The predominant feature of the emerging opposition
movements in Eastern Europe and the USSR is their

commitment to civil liberties. They ha\ e been marked by a
diverse political composition and the inclusion of

nonsocialist and non-working-class ideologies

"While a restoration ot capitalism is still possible in these
countries, the motive forces tor such a restoration are not
to be found among anti-socialist idct)logucs inside the civil
rights movement, but primarilv in the ingrained aggres-
siveness ol international capitalism and the imperialist
powers. . . .

"Anything that fosters a rise in working-class self-
organi/ation. self-conlidence. and ability to develop
independent political action, helps tip the scales in tavor of
political revolution and proletarian democracy — not
restoration ol capitalism."

—"The World Political Situation and the 1 asks of
the Fourth International," Inlenmiioiiul liucrnal
Discussion liulletin. Vol. XV. No. 5. Julv 1978

In other words, the "nonsocialist and anti-working-class"
elements in the dissident movement are allegedly insignifi-
cant both numerically and in their relation to world
imperialism. And, to the extent that they are able to carry
out their program, these elements end up objectively
serving the proletariat.

If taken seriously, such positions imply a fundamental
revision of the Trotskyist theory of Stalinism. First, to
believe that the possibility of capitalist restoration has been
completely eradicated within the boundaries of the Soviet
Union and that the only threat to the gains of the October
Revolution comes from, in the words of Mandel,
"ingrained aggressiveness of international capitalism and
the imperialist powers" is to embrace precisely the Stalinist
dogma of "socialism in one country." Under the cloak of
"anti-Stalinism" the Pabloist position actually rejects
Trotsky's indictment of the Stalinist bureaucracy based on
its contradictory role. On the one hand, the bureaucracy
rests on the social gains of the October Revolution; on the
other, Stalinist bureaucratic rule preserves and even
engenders forces within the degenerated and deformed
workers states that pose a threat to the social conquests of
the property transformations.

Mandel passes in silence over the only real mass
organization in the Soviet bloc that presently stands
outside the control of the bureaucracy and constitutes a
potential threat to it: the church. Mandel can smugly
dismiss the ravings of a Solzhenitsyn, but the reactionary

conliniied on pci^c IH

Nogues/Sygma

Helsinki Summit, 1975: USec paeans to "socialist democracy" echo 'Basket Three" concessions which
U.S. imperialism wrung from the USSR.

10

SPARTACIST

Fragile Unity in German USec

Where Pabloism Has Led the GIM

The leaflet translated and reproduced below was
distributed last spring by the Trotzkistische Liga
Deutschlands to a conference of the Gruppe Internationale
Marxisten, German section of the United Secretariat
(GIM). As one of the smaller and more provincial of the
European sections of the United Secretariat (USec), the
GIM has often been peripheral in the international clique I
faction fights of the USec. Some aspects of the history of
the GIM mentioned in this leaflet therefore require
identification and explanation.

In 1951-52 a Yugoslavfinanced liberal Stalinist party,
the UAP (Independent Workers Party), was formed in
West Germany. Responding to the international Pabloist
euphoria over Tito, the German section entered this
formation, which briefly enjoyed rapid growth. But with
Tito's rapprochement with Western imperialist powers
around the Korean War, Yugoslav funding for the UAP
ended — and the "party" experienced a quick and ignoble
end. The German Pabloists under the leadership of Georg
Jungclas then submerged for nearly two decades into the
rightward-moving German social democracy.

Deep entrist in the SPD, the USec "German section"

(which had no official name) scarcely intervened in the
youth radicalization of the late 1960's. By 1968-69 the
official USec section had reversed its orientation in order to
tail the student movement and had developed a strategic
perspective based on the supposed revolutionary potential
of the "red university." During this period WasTun (which
is now the central organ of the GIM) was published as the
would-be journal of the West German APO (Extra-
Parliamentary Opposition, the name by which the German
New Left referred to itself). A deep split occurred with
much of the youth leaving to publicly establish the
Internationale Kommunisten Deutschlands (IK D) in 1970.
The split was in a leftward direction but was partial and
essentially an empirical rejection of the Pabloist policies.
Several other splits quickly fragmented the IKD leading to
the existence in Germany of unstable and competing left-
centrist groupings which claimed to be anti- Pabloist.
Liquidation in the Social Democracy and equally unfruit-
ful submergence in the New Left have thus dominated the
history of the German Pabloists.

The dominant clique in the GIM, centered now on
Winfried Wolf, has remained in the direct continuity of this

For a Trotskyist
Perspective!

It's no secret that the GIM is in a crisis. Largely
liquidated public work, the turnover in membership, a
dwindling press run of Was Tun, boycotting their own
policies and fighting out of differences outside the
organization are only surface manifestations of a general
stagnation.

The crisis of the GIM is political. It is the product of
Pabloist methodology — seeking a substitute for the
Leninist-Trotskyist party, which as a cadre party must be
built "from the top down" on a firm programmatic basis
and rooted in the working class. Instead, the GIM tries to
find some other, "quicker" way to gain mass influence. It
searches for "new vanguards" which will spontaneously
come to revolutionary insights and into which the GI M can
integrate itself in order to give them the last little push to
the left: in short, those "unconscious Trotskyists" whom
the Pabloists have been trying to find in all parts of the
world for a quarter of a century now.

The path of the German section/GIM has led through
the Titoist UAP and more than 15 years of "integrationist
entrism" within the SPD right up to the "new mass
vanguard"/"new workers vanguard" — only to one blind
alley after another, to the destruction of cadres, demorali-
zation and cynicism.

In the draft [USec] document, "The Building of
Revolutionary Parties in Capitalist Europe" [1972],
Mandel predicted "the decisive battles" in about "four or

five years." Today this perspective, which was based on the
"new vanguard," has been proven to be the wrong track —
just like Maitan's remark in 1968 that "the International
will be built around Bolivia" and his confidence a year later
that the next [USec] world congress might indeed be held in
the seat of power in La Paz. In the late sixties the GiM
failed to intervene with a revolutionary program and
instead tailed after and sought to be "part" of the
movement. Now the GIM has been left sitting high and dry
after the APO-swamp dried up in resignation and
adaptationism.

The old "new mass vanguard" is dead. There has to be a
new substitute for the party: will the "Socialist Weekly"
conjure it up? Or Socialist Trade-Union Polities'] Or the
famous factory work of the "Faction"?

The sundry tendencies/factions/swamps of the GIM are
searching for their vanguards in seemingly counterposed
quarters. There's no real right/left polarization, however.
The dominant clique around Winfried Wolf sees its
prospects in a quasi-entrist orientation toward a left social-
democratic milieu that's moving to the right (SB, SOAG,
etc.), spiced up' with a few cynical, burnt-out ex-
Spartacusbunders and anti-AKW [nuclear power] freaks
as a field for mass intervention. The projections for a
"Socialist Weekly," the "socialist alternative" to fill "the
political vacuum to the left of the SPD," the "movement"
for a "fourth party" — all this is simply a warmed-over
version of the [old orientation toward the] "new mass
vanguard," which now has become older, flabbier, more
hostile to communists. It's obvious that the model is the
Socialist Challenge of the IMG. We applaud [IMG leader]
Tariq All's candor when he stated: "We of the IMG
continued on page 16

WINTER 1979

11

past, looking for some part of the New Left or social-
democratic left to tail. In recent years these aspirations
have been directed toward the Socialist Bureau, a left-
reformist grouping on the SPD periphery with some
influence among trade unionists and in the intellectual
milieu around Frankfurt, as well as toward left-talking
groups in the SPD youth.

On the other hand, oppositionists have pushed some
variation of a narrow workerist orientation against the
petty-bourgeois leadership. Around the "Tenth World
Congress" of the USec (February 1974) the Kompass
Tendency (German component of the international Third
Tendency who.se most prominent international figure was
the Italian Roberto Massari) called for an orientation to
the working class, embraced the American Socialist
Workers Party's (SWP) legalist rejection of the majority's
pro-guerrillaism and impressionistically characterized the
SPD as a "bourgeois party." In late 1974. however, the
majority of the Kompass dissolved into a bloc with the
Wolf clique to form the new GIM majority.

More recently, the Proletarian Faction has emerged as
the main organized opposition to the GIM leadership. The
ProFra orients to the most backward layers of the
proletariat and calls for liquidating Was Tun in favor of an
even less political journal which will .supposedly appeal to
the workers. The ProFra. which views the SPD as purely
bourgeois and the trade unions as hopelessly bureaucratic,
is an extreme syndicalist tendency which has abandoned

"The GIM Has Not Yet
Fallen Apart"

EDITOR'S NOTE: Reprinted below is a resolution that
the Central Committee of the GIM adopted unanimously
(with one abstention) on 9 July 1978. The document is
translated from a recent GIM internal bulletin fOlB No.
151, 20 July 1978). It quite graphically reveals just how
deep the German Pabloist organization has sunk into the
mud at the bottom of the latter-day Menshevik swamp.
Here the cynical leaders of the GIM call upon the USec to
appoint "a person generally regarded with trust" (a tall
order indeed!) to play a bonapartist role in keeping the
squabbling factions I cliques I swamps of the GIM together
in some semblance of a national organization. A classic
case of the cure being no better than the illness!

CALL FOR UNIFYING THE ORGANIZATION

Despite at times violent political conflicts the GI M has not
yet fallen apart. While this fragile unity may rest on the
realization that left to their own resources splinter
groupings cannot arrive at any political perspective for the
long run, nonetheless the fundamental common basis that
still exists must be underlined. It consists of the following
points:

Membership in the Fourth International, defense of
its theory and program

Evaluation of the state of capitalism as a whole and of
West German capitalism in particular

even the pretence of carrying programmatic politics (let
alone Trotsky is t politics) to the proletariat. The Zwischen-
sumpf (literally: Intermediate Swamp), as the name
implies, wavers between the other two tendencies, calling
for more trade-union work and defending the extreme
federalism produced by the GIM's extended political crisis.
The pro-SWP tendency in the GIM has been traditionally
small.

The Wolf group is currently seeking to emulate the
British IMG's (International Marxist Group, British
.section of the USec) Socialist Unity hodgepodge, attempt-
ing to launch a "socialist weekly" as a centrist f left-
reformist propaganda front with the Socialist Bureau and
left social democrats — while simultaneously capitulating
to the "Green" environmentalists, whom they "critically"
supported in recent elections in both Hamburg and Hesse.
The leadership group has also produced a token issue of a
trade-union oriented journal with a minimal program,
Sozialistische Arbeiterpolitik, in an attempt to undercut
ProFra criticism.

Since the TLD leaflet was distributed the GIM has held
its national conference. Its only "achievement" was the
bureaucratic expulsion of a comrade who alone had waged
a principled opposition to all the unprincipled cliques and
swamps in the GIM.

Trotzkistische Liga Deutschlands
January 1979

A conception of the GIM as a revolutionary
organization overwhelmingly not anchored in the
working class, an organization which must prepare a
revolutionary mass party and which currently faces
the task of transforming itself from a group whose
main activity is propagandistic into one which creates
a base for itself. The members and sympathizers must
be trained for work in mass movements, in particular
in the working masses. Agreement on the necessity of
working out a concrete program for revolutionary
politics in the BRD.

Abandoning the orientation toward the left-radical
camp and a turn toward centrist currents.
The extant differences of opinion are of a tactical and not
of a principled nature. Were it otherwise, then the GIM
would be an unprincipled bloc: its falling apart would then
liberate its parts from the need for crippling concessions to
one another. The most important differences are:

All currents call for primary orientation toward
factory work. But large parts of the organization do
not put this abstract credo into practice, either because
they do not take this task seriously enough, or see only
limited practical possibilities at present or in the short
run consider other tasks more important. The
evaluation of the trade unions and various questions
of tactics in the plants have been sharply disputed.
This is also true of political initiatives aimed at the
factories and trade unions, such as the Aktionskreis
Leben [Quality of Life Action Groups]. While the
decision on this question was adopted unanimously in
the CC, only parts of the organization have carried it
out.

continued on page 17

12

SPARTACIST

From the Archives of Trotskyism

Declaration
of the
Internationalist

^^i^^SH H HH B l^^ll H^^V^L^^V historically importarft docu-

^B^^W ■ WWW mm^^Wi^^ ment. The "Declaration of the In-

flp^^ .^B^ I .^^1 tcrnationalist Communists of

■ ^^^^1 IK'IIV^HI^^IV tfVIKl manifesto by

ll^r MI^BH^^^H ^^VF^fll^fl movement who

survived the Nazi concentration camp.
^ftB^^r^ ^^^2 Neither fascist torture nor Stalinist persecu-
jfc^^b.^^^^^^^ tion broke these comrades' political courage.
^^^^ - ■ Originally written in German, the

^, declaration was issued a little more than a
week after Buchenwald was liberated in April
1945. its third section was printed in a 1946
issue of Neiier Spartakus, the first German-
language Trotskyist press published after the
war. This part of the document was reprinted
in October 1974 in Die lnternalionale, ']o\xxna\
of the West German Pabloists. More recently,
two different French translations of the full
text have been published. One appeared in the
Bulleiin i^o. 10) of the Centre d'Etudes ettie
Rccherches sur les Mouvements Trotskyste et Revolutionnaires Internationaux
(CERMTRI); the second in Critique Communiste (No. 25, November 1978), journal
of the French Pabloists. Our translation is from the original German text, which
was obtained from the CERMTRI archives in Paris. This introduction is largely based
on the prefaces to the text which appeared in the CERMTRI Bulletin and Critique
Communiste.

The "Declaration of the Internationalist Communists of Buchenwald" was the
collaborative work of four comrades: the two Austrians Ernst Federn and Karl Fischer,
Marcel Beautrere and Florent Galloy, French and Belgian Trotskyists respectively. Like
many other German and Austrian Irotskyists, Federn and Fischer were seized by the Nazis
c\cn belorc the outbreak of the second imperialist war. Both were first arrested for their
revolutionary activities in Austria in 1935. Federn was released but Fischer and other
Austrian I rotskyists were imprisoned and tried in Vienna in 1937. Sentenced to five years'
imprisonment, they were released in the amnesty decreed on the eve of the German
annexation of Austria in February 1 938 and escaped to Belgium and later to France. Federn
was arrested again in 1938, sent to the Nazi camp at Dachau and later moved to
Buchenwald.

Above:

"Workers Song": de- Many of the Trotskyist cadres who were to join Federn at Buchenwald spent the first

tail of adrawingdone years of the war clandestinely organizing among German workers and soldiers under the

In Buchenwald. Nazi occupation. Their internationalist struggle made the scattered Trotskyist cells the

WINTER 1979

13

target of not only the Gestapo but also the Stalinists.

Marcel Beaufrere was typical of those Trotskyist militants whose clandestine work was
punished bv the Nazis with imprisonment in the death camps, in and out of prison since
1 939. when he had first been arrested for "provoking disobedience in the army," Beaufrere
worked closely with Marcel Hie. who had succeeded in regularly publishing La Verite
right under the Nazis' noses. In September 1943 Beaufrere was assigned to head up the
Trotskyist cell in Brittany, where the underground paper Arbeiler und Soldat was printed
and distributed among the German armed forces. Despite fierce repression (in October

1943 the Gestapo caught and shot some 65 members of the cell, including 30 German
soldiers and sailors), Trotskyist propaganda in German continued to be produced in great
quantity (with press runs as high as 10,000 copies) and disseminated as late as August
1944. Beaufrere was finally arrested in October 1943, tortured and then sent to
Buchenwald.

Many of the Trotskyist militants active in this work did not live to read the document
produced by the Buchenwald comrades. Marcel Hie survived Buchenwald only to perish
at Dora in 1944. Robert Cruau, the 23-year-old militant who headed the Trotskyist cell in
the Wehrmacht at Brest, was arrested in 1943 and, according to the Cn7;'^ue Commu/7/i7e
introduction by Rodolphe Prager:

"A little after his arrest Robert Cruau faked an escape in order to get himself killed. He wanted
to be certain not to talk and he was the primary target of the interrogators."

And Abram Leon, gifted author of the still definitive Marxist work on the Jewish
question and leader of the Belgian Trotskyist cell in the Wehrmacht, was arrested in J une

1944 when he arrived in theCharleroi region to assume control of the clandestine work
among the miners, which covered some 15 mines and included publication of Le Reveil
des Mineurs. Tortured by the Gestapo, Leon was exterminated in a gas chamber at
Auschwitz at the age of 26.

Despite the Nazi terror, the Trotskyists in the concentration camps sought to continue
fighting for their revolutionary program. Several accounts testify to the heroism and
courage of the Trotskyist cell at Buchenwald. According to an interview which Beaufrere
gave to an iSt representative in January 1979, when the Nazis were preparing to abandon
Buchenwald to the approaching Allied forces, the camp commandants broadcast over the
loudspeaker system an order for the prisoners to assemble. Recognizing that a final
round-up and execution of the Jewish inmates were very likely in the offing. Beaufrercand
his comrades immediately began to urge the inmates not to report for the assembly and to
get the political prisoners to give their identifying red emblems to the Jews, who were
forced to wear yellow stars on their uniforms. An almost certain mass slaughter of Jews
(and perhaps communists as well) was thus partially averted.

The political authority which the Internationalist Communists earned within the camp
played no small role in their survival. As was the case at other Nazi camps, at Buchenwald
the Trotskyists lived under the constant threat of assassination by the Stalinists, who in
most cases controlled the clandestine military apparatuses formed in some camps.
According to the interview with Beaufrere, the French Stalinist cell at Buchenwald
recognized him as a Trotskyist upon his arrival in January 1944 and vowed to kill him.
Elsewhere, Trotskyists were indeed murdered by the Stalinists — for example, Pietro
Tresso (Blasco), a leader of the clandestine Trotskyist organization (the PCI),
"disappeared" after a Stalinist-organized raid freed some 80 resistance fighters from Puy,
a Nazi camp in France. At Buchenwald the French Stalinists used their administrative
positions as trustees to assign Beaufrere to a task that would almost certainly lead to his
death. Beaufrere was saved from this "death warrant" by the active solidarity of the
German and Czech Stalinist cells, eventually also gaining the support of the other cells
(which were organized along national lines), including the Russian group.

What enabled Beaufrere to gain the sympathy and respect of these Stalinist cadres was
in no small measure the anti-chauvinist stand of the Trotskyists. Evidently many of the
German and Austrian Stalinists were repelled by the anti-German chauvinism of their
French CP "comrades." (At the time of the Allied "liberation" of France L'Humaniie ran
headlines such as "Everybody Get a Kraut!")

After his arrival in Paris in 1945, Beaufrere recounted for the French Trotskyist press

continued on next page

Mat

Ernec,. i-

14

SPARTACIST

the impact of the Buchenwald declaration on the German Stahnists:

"Some old German Communists came to find our Trotskyist comrades [in Buchenwald],
Beaufrere recounted on his return to Paris, and said to them, the hour has come, you must
publicly show yourselves, and they asked for a preliminary political discussion. A text of our
German comrades which declared us in favor of a soviet German republic had a profound
impact on the german Communist comrades, who asked to keep in touch with the Trotskyists."
— La Verite. 11 May 1945, quoted in Critique Communisie, November 1978

The Buchenwald declaration is not without its weaknesses. From the standpoint of
Trotskyism the manifesto contains formulations on the questions of the USSR and the
Fourth International that are fuzzy if not simply ambiguous. Thus, while the Soviet
bureaucracy is referred to as a caste, the declaration avoids characterizing the USSR as a
degenerated workers state. It quite explicitly puts a question mark over the future
evolution of the regime and nowhere calls for the unconditional military defense of the
USSR.

Likewise, while "1 V International" appears at the end of the document in parentheses,
the Fourth International and Trotskyism are not mentioned in the text. Rather, the
declaration states that "a new world revolutionary party" remains to be created.
These were not hasty formulations but the result of much discussion. Beaufrere and
Fischer held widely divergent positions on the class character
of the USSR and on the Fourth International. Even before the
war, Fischer had adopted a "state capitalism" analysis of the
USSR and his group had grown increasingly aloof from the
Fourth International.

The Buchenwald declaration represented a compromise.
Karl Fisher explained in a 29 May 1946 letter to his comrades
in Paris.

"It was composed jointly by Federn, Marcel Beaufrere, Florent
Galloy and me. In regard to Russia and the Trotskyists 1 had to
enter into a compromise, otherwise nothingat all would have come
out."

—quoted in Bulletin of the CERMTRI, No. 10

It should also be noted that the Declaration rathercategorically
predicts the imminent eruption of major inter-imperialist
rivalry between the U.S. and Britain. Such a projection, of
course, was very soon revealed to be false. However, the issues
involved were not new; in the mid-l920's Trotsky already
analyzed the bases for future Anglo-American inter-
imperialist rivalries. But at the close of World War II the U.S.
was clearly emerging as the hegemonic imperialist power.

Even with these weaknesses, the Buchenwald declaration
on balance is a principled and powerful statement of
revolutionary internationalism, an affirmation of revolutionary optimism in the capacity
of the communist vanguard to lead the resurgent proletariat out of its crisis of leadership
and toward the conquest of power.

ARBmiiijLDAT

I. The International Conjuncture of Capitalism

Above:

Trotskyist press In
France appealed to
the ranks of the Ger-
man arnny on a
proletarian-
internationalist

In the wake of the second imperialist war Italy, Germany and Japan have lost their
stature as great imperialist powers, while that of France has been severely undermined.

The imperialist antagonisms and conflicts between the USA and Great Britain
dominate the conjuncture of world imperialisi politics.

At the beginning of this world war Russia emerged from its isolation and today
confronts the task of politically and economically consolidating its military successes in
opposition to the appetites of the victorious imperialist powers.

Despite its enormous efforts China remains a pawn of the great imperialist powers, an
inevitable consequence of the victory of the Chinese bourgeoisie over the Chinese
proletariat.

The unanimity so ostentatiously displayed at the international imperialist peace
conferences is intended to dupe the masses by concealing the antagonisms inherent among
the capitalist powers. However, coinciding military interests vis-a-vis Germany cannot
prev&m the explosion of the antagonisms in the Allied camp. To these antagonisms must

WINTER 1979

15

be added the inevitable crises and the social tumult of the decaying capitalist mode of
production.

A precise analysis of the international situation using the methods of Marxism-
Leninism is the indispensable precondition for a successful revolutionary line.

II. The International Situation of the Working Class

This development renders it possible for the German proletariat to rapidly recover from
its profound defeat and to again place itself at the head of the European working class in
the battle for the overthrow of capitalism. Isolated by the failure of the revolution in
Europe, the Russian revolution has taken a course which has led it further and further
away from the interests of the European and international proletariat. The policy of
"socialism in one country," at first just a defense of the interests of the ruling bureaucratic
clique, today leads the Russian state to carry out a nationalistic policy shoulder to
shoulder with the imperialist powers. Whatever the course of events in Russia may be, the
international proletariat must cast off all illusions regarding this state and with the aid of a
clear Marxist analysis realize that the presently ruling bureaucratic and military caste
defends exclusively its own interests and that the international revolution cannot count on
any support from this government.

The total military, political and economic collapse of the German bourgeoisie opens the
road to liberation for the German proletariat. To prevent the restabilization of the
German bourgeoisie, facilitated by imperialist antagonisms, and to establish workers
power, the revolutionary struggle of the working class of each country against its own
bourgeoisie is necessary. The working class was deprived of its revolutionary leadership
by the politics of the two international workers organizations, which actively fought and
sabotaged the proletarian revolution that alone could have prevented this war. The
Second International is a tool of the bourgeoisie. Since the death of Lenin the Third
International has been transformed into an agency of the foreign policy of the Russian
bureaucracy. Both Internationals actively participated in the preparation and prosecu-
tion of this imperialist war and therefore share responsibility for it. To attribute
responsibility, or partial responsibility, for this war to the German and international
working class is only another way of continuing to serve the bourgeoisie.

The proletariat can fulfill its historic task only under the leadership of a new world
revolutionary party. The creation of this party is the most pressing task of the most
advanced sections of the working class, international revolutionary cadres have already
come together to construct this world party in the struggle against capitalism and its
reformist and Stalinist agents. In order to carry out this difficult task there must be no
avoiding the issue through the more conciliatory slogan of a new 2-1/2 International.
Such an intermediary formation would prevent the necessary ideological clarification and
would sap revolutionary will.

III. Never Again a 9 November 1918!

In the imminent pre-revolutionary period what is necessary is to mobilize the working
masses in the struggle against the bourgeoisie and to prepare the construction of a new
revolutionary International that will forge the unity of the working class in revolutionary
action.

All theories and illusions about a "peoples state" or a "peoples democracy" have led the
working class to the bloodiest defeats in the course of class struggle in capitalist society.
Only irreconcilable struggle against the capitalist state — up to and including its
destruction and the construction of the state of workers and peasants councils — can
prevent similar new defeats. The bourgeoisie and the uprooted petty bourgeoisie brought
fascism to power. Fascism is the creation of capitalism. Only the successful, independent
action of the working class against capitalism is capable of eradicating the evil of fascism,
along with its root causes. In this struggle the hesitant petty bourgeoisie will join forces
with the revolutionary proletariat on the offensive, as the history of the great revolutions
demonstrates.

In order to emerge victorious from the class battles to come the German working class
must struggle for the implementation of the following demands:
— Freedom of organization, assembly and the press!

— Freedom of collective action and the immediate restoration of all the pre-1933
social gains!

—Total elimination of all the fascist organizations! ,

conlinuea on page 22

Marcel Hic

Karl Fischer

16

SPARTACIST

Trotskyist Perspective...

(continued from page 10)

consider ourselves to be neither a revolutionary party nor
the nucleus of the revolutionary party" ( Was TunNo. 189).
That statement is correct and quite applicable to the GIM.

Well, how does someone with these political appetites
evaluate the relative electoral success of the Bunte Liste and
the Griine Liste [the Colored and Green Tickets: the slates
of eco-politicos who ran in the last state elections in West
Germany]? A tricky question! Perhaps the Bunte Liste
might be the "socialist alternative"? — even though the
"Socialist Alternative" [the abortive electoral rotten bloc of
fake lefts which the GIM attempted to broker] originally
had been projected as an alternative to the Bunte Liste.
Indeed, the initial reaction of many GIM comrades to the
shameless class-collaborationism of the KB [Communist
League, "Gang of Five" Stalinists who uncritically
promoted the Colored and Green Tickets] was impotent
disgust, and early on one could even hear terms like "mini
popular front." Yet when the hour of truth — election day —
approached. GIM members and sympathizers were told
that they were free to vote for the Bunte Liste. And after the
elections Anna Armand testified that, for "herself"
anyway, the old "Pabloist reflex." driiled-in for decades,
was still working as fast as ever: "Tail 'em!" How 'bout a
Bunte Weekly, then? Nope, there's already one. and with 64
pages to boot, even if it comes out only bi-weekly [namely,
the Arheiterkampf of the Communist League]. Our
suggestion: why not just add to the [GIM] masthead the
missing but well-recognized question mark: Was Tun?
[ What is To Be Done.'].

The "Proletarian Faction" [ProFra] is anything but a left
opposition. It only buries itself in liquidation into the
"virginal" proletariat and throws overboard any claim to
fighting for a communist program. The ProFra has simply
focused its impressionism on a different "sector of
intervention"; the factory. ProFra might believe that it's
doing something new; but the liquidationist politics of
Pabloism have not always been predominantly student
oriented. For example, the entry into the Italian CP (where
[USec chief] Maitan's group disappeared politically and
organizationally for 20 years) wasn't dissolution into a
soeiolo^icaliy petty-bourgeois milieu. And finally, w+ien
Mandel helped sell out the Belgian general strike of 1960-
61, he had the support of his section, consisting in its
majority of "tested trade unionists." Since ProFra has no
intention of fighting for a revolutionary program in the
factories, it is only one more barrier to the development of
class consciousness within the proletariat.

Both — the "majority" and the "faction" alike — are in
complete agreement on one thing: that the Transitional
Program has no relevance whatsoever for factory and
trade-union work. One need only compare "Our Princi-
ples" in the unnumbered initial issue of Sozialisiische
Gewerksihaftspolitik [Socialist Trade- Union Politics]
with the "let's-get-going" platform for Degussa [a chemical
plant near Frankfurt]: not a trace of even an oh-so-
watered-down version of a program of transitional
demands. And these brotherly enemies agree on still
another issue: like Mandel they are, ready at any time to
drop the "label of the Fourth International" within "24
hours."

The "Intermediate Swamp." so appropriately self-
named, is nothing but the crystallization of disgruntlement
without any perspective. It neither wishes nor is able to be
an alternative to the GIM leadership. It doesn't want to
take responsibility for the organization, and its opposition-
al stance is merely an excuse for pursuing parochial local
"arena work." It "struggles" (if at all) only to maintain the
circle spirit within the GIM. Subjectively revolutionary
elements will not find any alternative in this collection of
local cliques. The "Intermediate Swamp" is the result of the
bankruptcy of the international Third Tendency at the time
of the [USec] Tenth Congress, of the necessarily unsuccess-
ful attempt to construct an international tendency between
Pabloism and Trotskyism. The bloc, "in principle"
unprincipled, in the. GIM between the KT [Kompass
Tendency] and the part of the IT [Internationalist
Tendency of the Mandelites] around Winfried Wolf and
Huisberg in 1975 marked this development and was the
beginning of the present crisis.

The Two-and-One-Quarter International

What is still holding the GIM together as a federated
bloc, albeit with difficulty, is the at most ornamental label,
"Fourth International." and the vague claim to Trotsky-
ism. Yet the USec is just as heterogeneous and rotten as the
GIM. having long ago given up the attempt to struggle
internationally for a unified political conception. In our
article. "Forward to the 2i 4 International" (Kommuni-
siische Korresponden: No. 2 1 ) we gave extensive examples
to demonstrate that the present threadbare unity between
the centrist Majority (Mandel. Krivine. Tariq Ali & Co.)
and the reformist SWP above all depends on the current
absence of divisive international issues that would cause
the various factions to clash, as occurred over Portugal and
Angola in 1974-75. SWP leader Barry Sheppard's
subsequent admission that "at one point" USec supporters
in Portugal "would have been on opposite sides of some
actual barricades" only shows how the rapprochement
between the erstwhile opponents depends on a gentlemen's
agreement not to discuss which side of the barricades was
the right one at that time.

And the same is true of just about every other issue where
Mandel and Hansen at one time used their theoretical
knowledge to scourge the other's particularly gross
betrayals with pseudo-orthodox arguments. Until recently

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WINTER 1979

17

considered reformist even by many supporters of the IMT
and KT, the SWP has once again won acclaim from its
onetime critics on the basis of its new orientation toward
trade-union work. But trade-union work without revolu-
tionary program and based on adaptation to left bureau-
crats, such as friend-of-Carter Sadlowski. only means that
the SWP is sending tendrils of its reformism into new
terrain. (Fora striking example of this see the article on the
miners' strike in the new KK No. 22.)

For its part the SWP has conveniently forgotten its
pseudocriticism of the Majority's "popular frontism,"
although the electoral support which the PB of the French
LCR gave to Otelo (after the fact) and the GlM's call for
support to the Bunte Liste are classic examples of
capitulation to popular-frontist electoral blocs that make a
program of class collaboration.

Forward to the Rebirth of the Fourth
International!

The international Spartacist tendency (iSt) looks back
on a 15-year-long history of struggle for Trotskyism. Our
starting point was the struggle of the Revolutionary
Tendency, in the SWP against hailing Castro as an
"unconscious Trotskyist" and for the necessity of con-

structing revolutionary parties in all countries of the world
(including Cuba, China and Algeria). Our opposition to
the guerrilla road was not the SWP's legalistic fear,
expressed after the Ninth World Congress, of somehow
being linked with "violence"; rather, it was the struggle for
a proletarian perspective as opposed to guerrillaist
substitutionalism. The iSt has succeeded in building
fighting propaganda groups in half a do/en countries on
three continents — parts of a democratic-centralist interna-
tional tendency. The successes of SL/U.S. -supported
trade-union caucuses among seamen, longshoremen and
warehouse workers, auto and telephone workers, refute the
cynics who maintain that to achieve success one must water
down or completely abandon the Trotskyist program.

In Germany the TLD is struggling to overcome the
decades-long break in the continuity of Trotskyist politics
and to construct a party in the tradition of l.enin's Third
and Trotsky's Fourth International!

Read the press of the international Spartacist tendency!

Break with centrism!

For the reforging of the Fourth International!

24 June 1978
Trotzkistische Liga Deutschlands
Section of the international Spartacist tendency

GIM...

(continued from page 11)

Similarly disputed is the evaluation of the SPD.
The PB advocates initiatives toward centrist currents
with the goal of intervening in the differentiation
process to create a party left of the SPD. The
Proletarian Faction on the other hand advocates the
propaganda slogan "For the Creation of a Socialist
Workers Party." On this question there are numerous
intermediate positions. These orientations produce
subordinate differences on propaganda, press policy,
the distribution of resources, and the attitude to tactics
in elections.

Long-term coexistence of these differences in a small
organization like the GI M presents the acute danger of the
organization's falling apart. For two years the GIM has
been incapable of action on a national basis.
The most important criticisms at present are:

The national leadership lacks a sufficient political base
in the GIM. It is unable to organize an exchange of
information and experience in the GIM. Political
initiatives are carried out only by parts of the
organization. Hence the leadership has to limit itself to
various service functions and propaganda work. The
locals and cells are becoming independent. Isolated
from one another, they are attempting to develop their
own practice. This almost always leads to projects
which have not sufficiently matured and are
unsuccessful — and which are scarcely ever evaluated
self-critically and honestly to boot. This SB-ization
[Socialist Bureau-ization] must lead to the collapse of
the organization. The principle of democratic central-
ism is already openly rejected in some spots and even
more frequently ignored in practice. The national

leadership does not dare to insist on its implementa-
tion. The self-conception of the revolutionary organi-
zation is at stake. Discipline and political cohesiveness
are dissolving.

The unavoidable lack of success and of perspectives in
the isolated efforts to begin work heighten frustration
and aggressiveness in internal discussion. Collapse
looms in the loss of solidarity among the comrades.
A widespread criticism of the national leadership appeared
at the June N[ational] C[onference]. In all probability the
critics will be able to find support only from a minority in
the future as well. But on the other hand no other grouping,
coalition or political conception has appeared from which
an alternative leadership could emerge. Hence it is as good
as certain that the present up-in-the-air situation will
continue, and the collapse of the organization will be
hastened.

Hence self-preservation dictates attempting extraordi-
nary efforts to unify the organization. This can be attained
only via a common practice. To create the prerequisites for
this the following is proposed:

1. To form a Working Group [Arheitskommission] in
which all political currents of the GIM will as far as
possible cooperate, including those not represented in the
CC. The VS [United Secretariat] is requested, with the
agreement of the CC, to name a person generally regarded
with trust to head up the Group and to work toward
agreement.

2. The task of the Group will be to produce a detailed
program for the GIM's work in the coming year, which as
far as possible will not be open to "interpretation."

3. To appeal to parts of the GIM to take part in this
attempt at unifying our practice, to work out suggestions
for it, name representative delegates to the Working Group
and to work with it in a spirit of compromise. ■

18

SPARTACIST

Euro-Revisionists
Tail...

(continued from page 9)

influence of the Polish Catholic Church or East German
Lutheran Church should not be so easy to ignore. One need
only recall the reactionary role of the Catholic Church in
the Hungarian revolution of 1956. The Pabloist priests who
lull the vigilance of the East European working class
regarding the threat of capitalist restorationist tendencies
in their own countries should be blessed for their services
by the new pope in the Vatican.

Despite the prevalence of muddle-headed liberalism and
identification with imperialist "democracy" among the
dissidents, we condemn the brutal terror, crushing
censorship and ludicrous frame-ups endemic to Stalinist
bureaucratic rule. It is the monstrous crimes of the Stalinist
bureaucrats who drag the liberating goals of Marxism
through the mud which have alienated a layer of the
intelligentsia and turned them into bourgeois liberals,
nationalists, Zionists and religious obscurantists. Bui to
oust these parasitical bureaucratic castes and restore
genuine workers democracy through proletarian political
revolution requires that these tendencies be politically
defeated.

Even a healthy workers state, if faced with economic
backwardness and imperialist pressure, would not be free
of reactionary oppositional movements, arising primarily
from the petty bourgeoisie. However, a revolutionary
regime would base its policy towards such elements on
defending and extending the revolution. Given the
exigencies imposed by the need to defend the proletarian
dictatorship, a revolutionary workers government would
be guided by the norm that all tendencies have the freedom
of political expression except those who actively work for
the overthrow of the socialist revolution. This implies the
right of workers and petty-bourgeois elements to form pro-
socialist political parties which would compete with the
Bolshevik vanguard for influence in the Soviets. While
Stalinists can deal with dissidents only through terror, a
revolutionary regime would have at its disposal a far more
effective weapon: moral authority before the working

masses and th^ perspective of world revolution to destroy
imperialism.

Workers Democracy and the Dictatorship of the
Proletariat

If significant capitalist-restorationist forces cannot
emerge within the Soviet bloc, as Mandel implies, then
there is no need for the dictatorship of the proletariat. This
conclusion, implicit in Mandel's book on Eurocommu-
nism, is made explicit in a USec resolution misnamed
"Socialist Democracy and the Dictatorship of the
Proletariat" and co-produced by the Mandelite majority
and the S'WP {Intercontinental Press, 25 July 1977). It was
the issues raised in this document which cemented the
dissolution of factions in the USec. "Socialist Democracy
and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat" is an attempt to
present the USec as the most democratic of "socialist
democrats" with regard to Brezhnev's Russia.

Behind the abstract discussion of the democratic rights
of pro-bourgeois parties under the dictatorship of the
proletariat lurks the real question of the pro-Western
dissident movement in the USSR today. World, especially
American, imperialism has committed its great material
resources and powerful ideological influence to a cam-
paign for the democratic rights of the pro-Western dis-
sident movement in the USSR, ultimately for their right to
exercise governmental power. The USec's "Socialist
Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat" is but
the echo of Helsinki "Basket Three" and Carter's "Human
Rights" campaign as refracted through the Eurocommu-
nists with only one. completely stylistic, difference: the
"dictatorship of the proletariat" is not openly abandoned,
but instead filled with an entirely bourgeois-democratic
content.

For Trotsky the restoration of soviet democracy for the
w orking class was an integral part of restoring the USSR as
a bastion of world revolution, and not just in the sense of
moral inspiration. The USec document emphasizes not
democracy for the workers but democracy for the
bourgeoisie or, more precisely, for pro-bourgeois parties:
"But genuinely representative, democratically elected
workers councils can exist only if the masses have the right
to elect whomever they want without distinction, and
without restrictive preconditions as to the ideological or
political convictions of the elected delegates.... Any

While Mandel preaches his
pabulum about Eurocom-
munism, the Polish Pope and
U.S. imperialism aggressively
seek to in-
crease their
reactionary
leverage in
the Soviet
Bloc

countries.

ioland, in Bid for Loan, WiU Let
West's BanksMon^^

ByANNCRlTTENDEN „„„.communist

WINTER 1979

19

restriction of party affiliation restricts the freedom of the
proletariat to exercise political power, i.e., restricts
workers democracy, which would be contrary both to our
program and to the historical interests of the working
class."

— Intercontinental Press, 25 July 1977
A later passage is even more explicit:

''This means that freedom of political urbanization should
he f^ranted to all those, including prohourgeois elements,
w ho in actual practice respect the constitution of the
workers state, i.e., are not engaged in violent actions to
overthrow workers power and collective property. The
workers have no need to fear as a mortal danger
propaganda that 'incites' them to give the factories and
banks back to private owners. There is little chance that a
majority of them will be 'persuaded' by propaganda of that
type." [emphasis in original]

Just like the Eurocommunists, the Mandelites are eager
to guarantee that bourgeois forces should have the right to
restore capitalism if they can gain a democratic majority.
But if bourgeois forces can come to power and restore
capitalism through peaceful, legal soviet-constitutional
means, one cannot speak of the dictatorship of the
proletariat. For as Lenin so succinctly expressed it in his
famous polemic against Kautsky:

"The i.idispensable characteristic, the necessary condition
of dictatorship is i\\t forcible suppression of the exploiters
as a class, and, consequently, the infringement of 'pure
democracy', i.e., of equality and freedom in regard to that
class." [emphasis in original]

. — The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade
Kautskv {\9m

In a letter to G. Myasnikov dated 5 August 1921 Lenin
made his position even more categorical:

"The bourgeoisie (all over the world) is still very much

stronger than we are. To place in its hands yet another
weapon like freedom of political organization (freedom of
the press, for the press is the core and foundation of
political organization) means facilitating the enemy's task,
means helping the class enemy.

"We have no wish to commit suicide, and therefore, we will
not do this." [emphasis in original]

— Collected iVorks, Vol. 32. p. 505. Moscow(l973)
Predictably, the Mandelites have an escape clause
stating that the rights of the bourgeois parties might have to
be restricted in cases of civil war or war with imperialist
powers:

"This is our programmatic and principled norm-
unfettered political freedom for all those individuals,
groups, tendencies, and parties who in practice respect
collective property and the workers' constitution. This
does not mean that these norms can be fully implemented
irrespective of concrete circumstances. In the process of
establishing and consolidating the dictatorship of the
proletariat, civil war or international military interven-
tions have been and can be unleashed by the bourgeoisie.
Under conditions of civil war or foreign military
intervention, i.e., attempts by the former ruling classes to
overthrow workers power by force, then the rules of war
apply, and restrictions on the political activities of the
bourgeoisie may well be called for."

—Intercontinental Press, 25 July 1977

Here the USec presents "attempts by the former ruling
classes to overthrow workers power by force" as an
abnormal situation during the epoch of the dictatorship of
the proletariat. But the epoch of the dictatorship of the
proletariat is precisely a relatively brief historic period of
violent conflict between the proletariat and bourgeoisie on
an international scale; it is by its very nature an epoch of
continued on ne.xt page

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SPARTACIST

wars, civil wars and revolutions.

In the early I950's, when the Pabloists saw in the
Kremlin the main force of world revolution, they projected
centuries of bureaucratically-deformed workers states.
Now that thhy are tailing the Eurocommunists, the
Pabloists project centuries of democratically-governed
workers states, complete with an institutionalized bour-
geois opposition. This new conception is, if anything, even
more of a revision of Marxism than the earlier myth.

Just like the Eurocommunists, the Mandelites link
democratic rights for bourgeois tendencies in the Soviet
bloc to peaceful coexistence with imperialism. However, a
Soviet Russian workers state should be a proletarian
armed fortress of the world revolution. A political
revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy would bring
not peaceful coexistence but the mobilization of the world
proletariat against the imperialists. A revolutionary
internationalist foreign policy would, however, involve
certain short-term costs for the Soviet people. The level of
military expenditure would have to remain fairly high, the
imperialist countries would undoubtedly resort to econom-
ic blackmail, etc.

Under the pressure of imperialist encirclement,
conciliatory and even defeatist tendencies are likely to
emerge from the petty-bourgeois strata — intellectuals,
peasants, artisans. Therein lies the deeper socio-political
meaning of the present pro-Western Soviet dissident
movement, which is no! simply a wrongheaded reaction to
bureaucratic oppression along the line of "the enemy of my
enemy is my friend."

Andrei Sakharov, who was once a liberal Khrushchevite

INTERNATIONAL SPARTACIST
TENDENCY DIRECTORY

Ligue Trotskyste de France

Le Bolchevik, BP 421 09
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Spartacist Publications
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Trotzkistischen Liga Deutschlands

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Pack

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Trotskyist League of Canada

Box 7198, Station A

Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Spartacist League of
Australia/New Zealand

GPO Box 3473

Sydney, NSW, 2001, Australia

Mr. Euro-
Communism
crosses picket
line at Yale
University
to get a
respectable
platform to
plead his
case before
U.S.

imperialist
policy-
ipakers.

and top Kremlin adviser on nuclear policy, represents those
elements in the Russian petty-bourgeois elite who have
become Soviet ilefeaiist with regard to imperialism. In a
sense this most prominent Soviet dissident has taken the
policy of "peaceful coexistence" to its logical conclusion:
advocacy of the restoration of capitalism. Thus in 1973,
before he fully became a pro-American cold warrior,
Sakharov wrote:

"I have believed and believe now that the only real way to
solve world problems is the movement of each side toward
the other, the convergence of the capitalist and socialist
systems accompanied by demilitarization, reinforcement
of socialist protection for workers' rights, and creation of a
mixed type ot economy."

— Andrei D. Sakharov. Sakharov Speaks, edited by
Harrison Salisbury (1974)

A revolutionary (Trotskyist) government in the Soviet
Union would have to combat such defeatist tendencies
toward imperialism arising from the petty-bourgeois
strata. A future Trotskyist party in the USSR will certainly
not overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy in order to then
turn power over to the Helsinki monitoring groups.

How Mandel Rehabilitates Stalinists/
Eurocommunists

Mandel seeks to link Eurocommunism to the
democratization of Stalinist Russia by calling upon
West European CP leaders to demand that the Kremlin
rehabilitate Trotsky and all the Bolshevik old guard. In his
essay on the 1976 East Berlin Communist conference
included in From Stalinism to Eurocommunism Mandel
writes:

" I hey [the Eurocommunist leaders] should demand the
public rehabilitation of Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev.
Kamenev. Rakovsky. and all the old Bolsheviks. They
should demand that the works of these revolutionaries be
freely published in the USSR and the People's Democra-
cies. Otherwise their pledges of socialist democracy have
little credibility."

The rehabilitation of the old Bolshevik leaders is the

WINTER 1979

21

Mandelites' main tactical overture to the Eurocommunists.
Right now the USec (both the MandeHtes and the SWP) is
acttvely supporting the campaign to rehabilitate Bukharin
led by Italian CP intellectuals, who see in him, not without
reason, a forerunner of Dubcek's "socialism with a human
face."

The Mandelites' "rehabilitate the old Bolsheviks"
campaign directed at the Eurocommunists stems from a
number of motives. To disassociate their present "demo-
cratic" posture from Stalin's terror, the Eurocommunist
leaders occasionally say a good word about the old
Bolsheviks murdered by the "Great Father of the Peoples"
in the Kremlin. Mandel seizes upon these statements as
proof that the veteran Stalinist hacks are responding to the
"anti-bureaucratic consciousness" of the militant workers.

To prettify Carrillo as a great proletarian democrat.
Mandel falsifies outright the Spanish CP leader's position
on Andres Nin, a former Trotskyist killed by the Stalinists
during the Spanish Civil War. According to Mandel,
Carrillo "completely rehabilitates Andres Nin against the
slanderous accusations made against him by the Spanish
Communist Party and the Communist International." Is
that so? in fact, Carrillo condemns Nin's role in the
Barcelona May Days of 1937 (a spontaneous insurrection
against the Popular Front government) as "an act of high
treason," for which "exemplary punishment by the courts
was legally and morally justified" {Eurocommunism and
the Stale). Carrillo demurs that Nin should only have been
imprisoned, like the other leaders of the May Days, and not
murdered. This season Mandel finds it opportune to act as
lawyer for Carrillo against the Kremlin, and so is
manufacturing evidence on his would-be client's behalf.

Mandel's demand that the West European CP leaders do
honor to the Bolshevik old guard also expresses the long-
standing Pabloist view that the world Stalinist movement
and now its Eurocommunist extension represents the
deformed continuation of Lenin's Communist Internation-
al, and so is itself capable of revolutionary rehabilitation.
In this sense the Mandelites' "rehabilitate the Bolshevik old
guard" campaign is part and parcel of the traditional
Pabloist orientation to the self-reform of the Stalinist

Nikolai Bukharin

bureaucracy, in this case via the Eurocommunists to the
liberal bureaucrats and dissidents in the Soviet bloc.

To call upon the Stalinist apparatus today to rehabilitate
its victims of yesterday is to elevate these criminals and
murders, betrayers of proletarian revolution, to the judges
and final arbiters of the Bolshevik tradition. There could be
no greater damage to building revolutionary Fourth
internationalist parties in the Soviet bloc than identifying
the Trotskyist cause with those West European so-called
"communists" who have dropped even the posture of
defending the USSR against imperialism in favor of
Carter's anti-Soviet, pro-imperialist "Human Rights"
campaign. Trotsky and his Bolshevik comrades who made
the October Revolution will be "rehabilitated" only by the
proletarian political revolution that ousts the Stalinist
bureaucracies and the socialist revolution that sweeps the
Carrillos, Marchais and Berlinguers into the dustbin of
historv. ■

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22

SPARTACIST

Buchenwald...

(com inued from page 15)

— Confiscation of their property for the benefit of the
victims of fascism!

— Conviction of all representatives of the fascist state
by freely elected peoples courts!

— Dissolution of the Wehrmacht and its replacement
by workers militias!

— Immediate free election of workers and peasants
councils throughout all of Germany and a convocation of a
general congress of these councils!

— Preservation and extension of these councils, while
utilizing all the parliamentary institutions of the bourgeoi-
sie for revolutionary propaganda!

— Expropriation of the banks, heavy industry and the
large estates!

— Control of production by the unions and the workers
councils!

— Not one man, not one penny for the war debts and the
war reparations of the bourgeoisie!
— The bourgeoisie must pay!

— For pan-German socialist revolution! Against a
dismemberment of Germany!

— Revolutionary fraternization with the proletarians of
the occupying armies!

— For a Germany of workers councils in a Europe of
workers councils!

— For world proletarian revolution!

The Internationalist Communists of Buchenwald
(IV International)— 20 April 1945

Spartacist Slogan
Scandalizes...

(continued from page 24)

A similar fate befell the Frankfurt sect known as the
Bund Sozialistischer Arbeiter (BSA), the German mini-
satellite of the Healyite Workers Revolutionary Party in
Britain. Outside a meeting on Iran held by the BSA on
November 2 members of the TLD sold copies of
Kommunistische Korrespondenz with an article on Iran.
Evidently the TLD intervention made an impact, for the
BSA turned up at its own next meeting on Iran with a
leaflet that was half devoted to attacking the TLD and the
iSt and half devoted to enthusing over "the anti-imperialist
content of the struggle being waged by Khomeini." After
quoting at length from Kommunistische Korrespondenz
the BSA added indignantly. "Because the TLD was selling
this article on November 2 in front of a meeting of the BSA
in Frankfurt, there developed an erroneous impression
among some people that we had something in common
with these politics."

Not only the fake "Trotskyists" but also their would-be
IVIuslim allies have seized upon our slogan as "//le
communist position" on Iran. Khomeini and his devout
followers do not want the support of leftists; Khomeini has
often vehemently denounced IVlarxism as fundamentally
hostile to Islamic doctrine. But perhaps the most revealing
rebuff to his aspiring leftist allies came in an interview
which his principal spokesman, Ibrahim Vazdi, gave to
BBC Radio 4 on January 7 in Paris. When pressed by the
interviewer to clarify Khomeini's attitude to a "united

Slogans on Iran

The following motion was adopted at a national
conference o f the Trotzkistische Liga Deutschlands on
10 Fehuary 1979. It was subsequently endorsed
unanimously hy a meeting of the International
Executive Committee of the international Spartacist
tendency that included substantial representation from
the Ligue Trotskyste de France and the Spartacist
League! Britain.

* * *

The slogan "Down with the shah, Down with the
mullahs" expresses the strategic IVlarxist perspective for
the outcome of the Iranian revolution: alifewithoutthe
shah and without the m'ullahs. In addition the slogan
correctly counterposed us as the revolutionary Marx-
ists to the theocratic reactionaries presently leading the
mass movement. There is a weakness to the slogan in
that it expresses a historical perspective but lacks a
tactical element; also, at the time that the slogan was
first promulgated the shah was still in power, and the
slogan implied an equivalency between theshahand the
mullahs. In the hands of revolutionary Marxists the

slogan was used toexpressthecorrect program; in other
hands it could be used to mask a sectarian program. Asa
general propaganda slogan from afar, it warned
powerfully and angularly of the catastrophic consequ-
ences of tailingafter Khomeini. That is why it earned the
enmity not only of Muslim fundamentalists but also of
the opportunist leftists, who almost without exception
joined the mullah camp.

In the hands of revolutionary Marxists the slogan
"Down with the shah. Break with the mullahs" could be
used correctly, but in other hands the loopholes in the
formulation wguld allow this slogan to be used to
express an opportunist program, including seeking to
work from the inside ofthe camp ofthe mullahs, seeking
the non-existent "progressive" wing of the mullahs. In
short, this slogan, in the hands of opportunists, is an
expression of the stagist theory ofthe revolution.

The third slogan "Down with theshah, Nosupportto
the mullahs" avoids the pitfalls of both of the previous
slogans, and although it expresses our program less
angularly and forcefully than the first slogan, cuts
through the possible misuse of either of the other
slogans.

WINTER 1979

23

Cover of Payam Daneshjoo (right)
published by Iranian supporters of the USec
carries photo of anti-shah protest under the
slogans, "Down with the Shah monarchy,
Long live the Constituent assembly, Long
live the republic of workers and peasants."
Cropped from the photo were the banners
(left) with slogans that hailed "Our leader
Khomeini" and "the Muslim nation of Iran."

front" with Communists, Yazdi bluntly replied: "They call,
'Down with the Mullahs, Down with the Shah.' That's not
supporting the Islamic Muslims."

Unlike these opportunists the iSt seeks and struggles to
be identified with the hard communist line on Islamic
reaction. Our slogan of "Down with the Shah! Down with
the Mullahs!" is not intended to win instant popularity
among the masses in Iran who still have illusions in
Khomeini. It is dictated by the historic experiences of the
proletariat and toiling masses who have passed through
and shed just such illusions.

Already many leftists in Iran are learning through bitter
experience that their illusions in Khomeini, or in some kind
of "unity and struggle" with his turbaned followers, were
disastrous. Since the departure of the shah and the
intensification of the governmental crisis in Teheran, the
mullahs and their devout followers have taken a new
offensive to assert their domination over the heterogeneous
opposition forces.

At cosmopolitan Teheran University, meetings called to
merely discuss the role of Khomeini have been physically
attacked by marauding gangs of Muslim fundamentalists.
In mid-January a mass march through Teheran by leftists
carrying banners that included the slogan "Long Live
Khomeini" was attacked by Muslim fanatics who chanted,
"The only party is the party of allah!" And upon his return
to Iran Khomeini openly called for a /;77ai/ against a// non-
Persians and supporters of foreign powers, which means
above all the foreign workers and the left: "1 beg God to cut
off the hands of all evil foreigners and all their helpers"
(quoted in A'^h- York Times, 1 February 1979).

Under the hammer blows of Islamic reaction at least
some subjectively revolutionary militants inside Iran and
abroad will decisively break with opportunist capitulation
to petty-bourgeois Islamic populism. And when they
realize that Khomeini needs SAVAK and the CIA just as
much as did the shah, we want to make sure that they also
know that only one tendency from the outset sounded the
warning — the international Spartacist tendency. ■

Really bizarre
ravings from
the Heaiyite
slander mill:
BSA leaflet
on Iran
calls James
Robertson of
the Spartacist
League/U.S.
the "main
spokesman for
the national
interests of
the American
bourgeoisie"!

21

SPARTACIST

WINTER 1979

"Down with the Shah! Down with the Mullahs f

Spartacist Slogan Scandalizes
Fake-Trotskylsts

• CHftW

For the past year Iran has been rocked by convulsive
mass opposition to the tyranny of the butcher shah. This
seething popular discontent among broad strata of the
population could make Iran the cockpit of proletarian
revolution in the Near East. But in the absence of
revolutionary prole-
tarian leadership, the
unrest has been chan-
neled into a reaction-
ary crusade for an
"Islamic republic." En-
raged even by the
minimal secularizing
and modernizing mea-
sures of the shah's so-
called "White Revolu-
tion." Ayatoliah
Khomeini and his
priestlv caste of
IHO.OOd mullahs want
to impose over all of
Iran the Muslim-tra-
ditionalist norms of
Qum, where no wom-
an dares appear in
public without the
head-to-foot veil.

Virtually the entire
international left has
capitulated to the pop-
ularity of the mullah-dominated opposition. Against this
backdrop the propaganda of the international Spartacist
tendency (iSt) for the proletariat to sweep away the
monarchy and establish a workers and peasants govern-
ment has had an impact far beyond our small forces.

In the United States Maoists proclaiming the mullahs
"progressive" and Muslim students defending the slogan
"Death or he/ah" ("modesty" — i.e., the veil) have vied with
each other in seeking to break up Spartacist public forums
on Iran. But even more striking has been the response in
Europe, as virtually every self-styled "Trotskyist" tendency
has been at pains to defend itself against the charge that
"You Trotskyites stand for 'Down with the Shah! Down
with the Mullahs! Not us, not us," squeak the
opportunists, terrified that anyone could accuse them of
upholding an authentic Leninist line.

Particularly embarrassed are the United Secretariat
(USec) supporters of the Committee Against Repression in
Iran (CARI) front group. In England the Spartacist
League/ Britain has aggressively propagandiz-ed for "Down
with the Shah! Down with the Mullahs!" in its press and

3-jKiem.

Spartacist League/U.S.
January 20.

public meetings. Iranian leftists were soon approaching
CARI members on their attitude toward "the Trotskyist
position." According to one CARI leaflet in Persian, a
CARI activist was expelled from an Iranian Stalinist-
controlled student group on the grounds that this slo-
gan had been "one of
the slogans" of a CARI
demonstration.

In a Persian-lan-
guage leaflet dated 16
October the CARI
Executive Committee
protested:

"CARI is strongly
against the slogan
'Down with the Shah!
Down with the IVlul-
lahs!' The position of
CARI is to defend all
the struggles of all
militants against the
shah, including the
struggles of the militant
religious people."

Of course, CARI was
less than willing to
defend the struggles of
Spartacist militants
against the shah.
CARI excluded Spar-
tacist League/ Britain
contingents from
CARI-sponsored demonstrations in Birmingham on
December 2 and London on December 17, criminally
provoking police intervention.

The USec has clearly felt similar pressure in France,
where the Ligue Trotskyste de France has actively
publicized the Trotskyist slogan. CARI's French incarna-
tion felt compelled to reproduce and distribute the 16
October CARI -Executive Committee statement in
response.

Likewise, in West Germany the Trotzkistische Liga
Deutschlands (TLD), German section of the iSt, has
succeeded in making our slogan known as "the Trotskyist
position on Iran." For example, in West Berlin the deeply
demoralized, centrist Spartacusbund sought to add its
name to a leaflet circulated by Iranian and other foreign
student groups that was uncritical of Khomeini and the
mullah-led movement in Iran. However, despite their
apologetics for Khomeini, the Spartacusbund was not
permitted to sign the statement, because, charged the
Iranian nationalists, "the Trotskyists" oppose the mullahs.

conliniu'd on pa^e 22

Workers vanguard

demonstrates in Los Angeles on

SPARTAOST

NUMBER 27-28

WINTER 1979-80

75 CENTS

The American government is talking as if it is about to
start World War III over Afghanistan — or at least a
vicarious form of it around the Olympic games. In his
"state of the union" speech Jimmy Carter openly
threatened a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union
in the Persian Gulf. Because the USSR came to the aid of
its allies in Kabul, Washington has visions of the Soviet
army seizing Iranian and Saudi oilfields, of the staid
Brezhnev fomenting revolution among the Kurds, Turko-

mans and, above all, Baluchis. ■1^^ It is patently absurd
but the American president really believes it.

Behind Washington's present Cold War frenzy is the
fundamental imperialist desire tO' obliterate the social
conquests of the Russian October Revolution. Compared
to 20 years ago, however, the United States' world position
is greatly weakened and the role of its imperialist allies
much greater. The end of U.S. hegemony was marked by

continued on page 2

Attempted Murder of
German Spartacist 5

Rotten Blocs Shatter

United Secretariat 6

Khomeini's Iran: History Takes

Its Vengeance 8

Morenoites Call For Counterrevolution
in USSR 9

No "Critical Support"
for Popular Frontism 26

Document of the First Delegated
Conference of the ISt 34

2

SPARTACIST

Nixon's 15 August 1971 New Economic Policy, which
destroyed the basis for the post-war capitalist international
monetary system. Now the U.S. meets indifference from
West Europe and Japan when calling for economic
boycotts of Iran and the Soviet Union. Carter is certainly
prepared to plunge the world into nuclear holocaust, but
whether he can mobilize the population at home and
imperialist allies abroad to effectively wage a new Cold
War is far from clear.

The effective deployment of thousands of Soviet troops
in Afghanistan is a stinging humiliation for American
imperialism. The Russian high command watched as
Khomeini's Iran slipped into near-total chaos, as U.S.
aircraft carriers lined up in the Arabian Sea, as the Soviet-
allied Kabul government was threatened by a reactionary
Islamic jihad {ho\y war). Seeing Washington at an impasse
in Iran, the Kremlin bureaucrats seized the time to quell the
uprising by the Afghan mullahs and khans, and in the
process extended their defense perimeter by several
hundred miles around the eastern flank of Iran.

Anti-Soviet opinion around the world — from the White
House to the Chinese Great Hall of the Peoples, from "non-
aligned" neo-colonies like Zambia to the Spanish and
Italian Communist parties — railed against "Soviet expan-
sionism" which allegedly "had trampled on the national

SPARTACIST

(Fourth Internationalist)
An Organ of Revolutionary Marxism

EDITORIAL BOARD: Charles O'Brien (managing), Helene Brosius,
Elizabeth Gordon, Jan Norden, James Robertson, Reuben Samuels,
Joseph Seymour, John Sharpe, David Strachan
PRODUCTION MANAGER: Noah Wilner
CIRCULATION MANAGER: Karen Wyatt
Published for the International Secretariat of the international
Spartacist tendency. In accord with the "Declaration for the Organizing
of an International Trotskyist Tendency," by the Spartacist Publishing
Company, Box 1377, GPO, New York, N.Y. 10001. Telephone: 732-7862.

Opinions expressed in signed articles or letters do not necessarily
express the editorial viewpoint.

Number 27-28 : t»5 x "3 Winter 1979-80

^ ^

sovereignty and integrity of Afghanistan." The imperialist
media pulled out all the stops to build sympathy for
"freedom fighters" battling sophisticated tanks and planes
with sticks, stones and chants of "allah akbar." But in the
military clash between the Soviet soldiers backing the
nationalist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan
(PDPA) and the feudal (and pre-feudal) forces aided by
imperialism, Marxists ' side with the forces representing
social progress, now led by Russian tanks. That is why the
international Spartacist tendency has resoundingly ex-
claimed: Hail Red Army! Extend social gains of the
October Revolution to Afghan peoples!

Even if the country is incorporated into the Soviet bloc —
a tremendous step forward compared to present conditions
in Afghanistan — this can today only be as a
bureapicratically deformed workers state. Only Trotskyist
parties armed with the program of permanent revolution
can lead the colonial masses to their complete liberation —
through proletarian political revolution in the USSR
linked to socialist revolutions from Iran to the imperialist
centers. But the liberation of the Afghan masses has begun!

"Born Again" Cold War

The pretext of Soviet troops in Afghanistan was
exploited by U.S. president Carter and his Dr. Strangelove
"national security" adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski to trans-
late their anti-Soviet "human rights" rhetoric into action.
Washington is now organizing a grain boycott of the Soviet
Union in the hope of fomenting social discontent. Carter/
Brzezinski's message to the Soviet people: Starve for
"human rights"! But we doubt that the Soviet masses, who
survived Hitler's siege of Leningrad, will respond favorably
to the U.S. imperialist rulers' blackmail.

And food is hardly the ultimate weapon. Carter's pious
lies about SALT are a thing of the past as the U.S. embarks
on a mammoth arms drive. Now there will be a massive
weird subway system in the western U.S. to move around
the MX mobile missile, a projected first-strike weapon.
Carter demanded that NATO allies, including West
Germany, accept 572 nuclear missiles targeted at the
USSR. And he committed the U.S. to increase real military
spending by 5 percent annually for the next five years. All
this before the Afghan crisis.

Now the claptrap about "detente," SALT, etc. — by
which the imperialists seek to negotiate disarmament of the
Soviet degenerated workers state — has been put into
mothballs. Of course, this counterrevolutionary diplomat-

WINTER 1979-80

3

ic farce would not have gotten even this far were it not for
the class-collaborationist, pacifistic illusions of the
Kremlin bureaucracy.

As a further step in Washington's war drive, Secretary of
"Defense" Harold Brown was dispatched to Peking to
deepen the anti-Soviet U.S. /China alliance, already twice
tested militarily: over the South African invasion of
Angola and the Chinese invasion of Vietnam. Now the
Pentagon wants the Peking Stalinists to channel arms to
the reactionary Afghan rebels through their mutual client
state, Pakistan. With unprecedentedly forthright bellicosi-
ty, Brown's toast at a state banquet called on China to join
American imperialism "with complementary actions in the
field of defense as well as diplomacy."

The Russians are finally fed up with the nuclear loading
of NATO, the "modernizing" of China's arsenal, plans for a
"rapid deployment" strike force, draft registration and the
sky-high Pentagon budget. In a Moscow meeting with

French National Assembly president Jacques Chaban-
Delmas, Brezhnev reportedly warned that Russia "would
not tolerate" the nuclear arming of Peking by the U.S.,
declaring: "Believe me, after the destruction of Chinese
nuclear sites by our missiles, there won't be much time for
the Americans to choose between the defense of their
Chinese allies and peaceful coexistence with us."

With the Russians made fair game in Carter's Cold War
rampage — detente deals off, promised grain and Aeroflot
jets stranded, the attempt by New York air controllers to
crash a Soviet plane carrying the USSR's ambassador
to Washington — Brezhnev's ultimatum is eminently
reasonable.

Indeed, for a wide range of public opinion, Washington
is now acting like a m^ dog that slipped the leash. George
Kennan, who was one of the main architects of the early
Cold War, undoubtedly speaks for substantial bourgeois
continued on next page

MIL I

Spartacist Britain

Internationalism in
action: Spartacist
demonstrations calling
for defense of USSR
and victory of Red
Army over Afghan
reactionaries in
London (above),San
Francisco (above
right) and Sydney
(right).

1^ WarDHveJ

Workers Vanguard

.^^v ),wmk-
Mh'-'i rdnrd

4

SPARTACIST

sentiment when he cautions against Carter's "strident

public warnings" to military action:

"I can think of no instance in modern history where such a
breakdown of poHtical communication and such a
triumph of unrestrained military suspicions as now marks
Soviet-American relations has not led, in the end, to armed
conflict."

—New York Times, 1 February

For its part, the Kremlin is still seeking accommodation
with "realistic, peace-loving" elements of the imperialist
bourgeoisie. Whatever their defensive responses to Carter's
Cold War frenzy, the Russian Stalinist bureaucracy
remains wedded to "peaceful coexistence" with world
capitalism. But their "peaceful coexistence" will not bring
peace. As American Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon
declared during the Korean War:

"The class struggle of the workers, merging with the
colonial revolution in a common struggle against
imperialism, is the only genuine fight against war. The
Stalinists who preach otherwise are liars and deceivers.
The workers and colonial peoples will have peace when
they have the power and use their power to take it and
make it for themselves. That is the road of Lenin. There is
no other road to peace."

—The Road to Peace (1951)

Hue and Cry Over Afghanistan

Today in Afghanistan U.S. imperialism finds itself in
league with the defenders of the bride price and the veil,
usury and serfdom, and perpetual misery. Victory of the
Islamic insurgents in Afghanistan would mean the
perpetuation of feudal and pre-feudal enslavement. For
that reason we have called for the military victory of the
left-nationalist PDPA regime. Now the direct deployment
of Soviet troops and confirmation of the Islamic rebels'
imperialist ties changes the terms of the conflict. With the
Stalinist rulers in the Kremlin, for defensive reasons, for
once taking up a genuinely red cause, defense of the USSR
itself is directly posed. The Trotskyists stand at their posts.

Much has been made of "the Afghan right to self-
determination" — an obscure question (as well as
subordinate to overriding class issues) since Afghanistan is

a state and not a nation. But if this "fiercely independent
Islamic people," as Carter put it, is about to suffer such
horrendous national oppression at the hands of the
Soviets, why can Moscow use Muslim-derived Central
Asian troops? Obviously because they know that condi-
tions in Soviet Central Asia are vastly superior to those in
mullah-ridden Afghanistan. In particular the position of
women is a key index of social progress. As the New York
Times (9 February) has admitted, "It was the Kabul
revolutionary Government's granting of new rights to
women that pushed orthodox Moslem men in the
Pashtoon villages of eastern Afghanistan into picking up
their guns." The bride price was a lifetime's savings or
lifelong debt to money lenders who charged usurious rates
and gave the mullahs their cut in donations. For women it
was chattel slavery; for men without means, no money
meant no sex with women.

From a military point of view the Soviet intervention
vmay or may not have been wise, though certainly it is
deeply just to oppose the Islamic reactionary insurgents
backed by imperialism. There can be no question that for
revolutionaries our side in this conflict is with the Red
Army. In fact, although uncalled for militarily, a natural
response on the part of the world's young leftists would be
an enthusiastic desire to join an international brigade to
fight the reactionary CIA-connected rebels.

Yet, scandalously, much of the Western left is dancing to
Carter's tune. The Maoists, already seasoned drummer
boys for the Pentagon, hail the imperialist grain embargo
and call on the U.S. to step up aid to the Islamic insurgents.
Their anti-Soviet hysteria goes to such lengths that in
Frankfurt, West Germany they joined with Afghan ultra-
rightists in an attempted stabbing murder of a leader of the
Trotzkistische Liga Deutschlands (section of the iSt) on
January 25. Even ostensible Trotskyists are joining the
imperialist hue and cry, as the British IMG headlined
"Soviet Troops Out of Afghanistan." Their comrades in the
French LCR waver from week to week between opposing
the mullahs and opposing the Soviet army. And the
American SWP tries to pretend that "Soviet intervention is
not the issue," that calling the tribesmen "Muslim rebels" is

Spartacist

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WINTER 1979-80

5

Afghan Ultra-Rightists, Maoists Seal
Anti-Soviet Bloc in Blood

Attempted Murder of
German Spartacist

REPRINTED FROM YOUNG SPARTACUS
NO. 79. FEBRUARY 1980

FEBRUARY 3— A near-fatal knife wound left
German Trotskyist Fred Zierenberg fighting for his life
in a Frankfurt hospital. The murderous, premeditated
attack occurred on January 25 at a public teach-in on
Afghanistan at the University of Frankfurt, West
Germany. Reactionary Afghanis, Turkish Islamic
fanatics and their Maoist lackeys — members of "Fight
Back" from the U.S. volunteer army stationed in West
Germany — formed a bloc and planned the attack in
advance.

The meeting consisted of a series of virulently anti-
Soviet speeches and chants of "Death to Trotskyism!"
and "Down with the Soviet Union!" During the
discussion period a member of the Trotzkistische Liga
Deutschlands (TLD, German section of the interna-
tional Spartacist tendency) went to the podium to take
the time to speak that she had been granted by the
chair. At a signal from the "Fight Back" members, the
mullah-lovers launched their vicious attack. In the
flurry of fists, boots and knives, seven TLD members
and supporters received injuries. In addition to
Zierenberg, one comrade received a knife wound in the
abdomen, another was beaten unconscious, the others
got teeth knocked out and serious blows to the ears.
The woman who attempted to speak received a series
of vicious kicks to the abdomen. It is clear that these
right-wing thugs planned to maim and kill.

The Islamic fanatics and their Maoist goons
particularly singled out Fred Zierenberg for attack.
Zierenberg, a leading spokesman for the TLD and a
trade unionist for more than ten years, was immediate-
ly surrounded at the "Fight Back" signal and knifed
from behind, receiving a potentially mortal wound that
resulted in a 30 percent collapse of one lung. He

a lie. Meanwhile, the pseudo-leftist "Parity Committee" of
Morenoites and Lambertists calls for military support to
the Afghan reactionaries and even for extending the
"Islamic revolution" into the Soviet Union!

One reason for the fake-lefts' shameful confusion and
outright counterrevolutionary backing for the imperialist-
aided rebels is that they all support the analogous
movement — Khomeini's theocratic, clerical-feudalist
regime — next door in Iran. But in Afghanistan the CIA and
Khomeini are on the same side of the barricades, and
massive Red Army support to the Kabul regime against the
American and Pakistani-backed Islamic tribal revolt poses
the Russian question pointblank.

Fred

Zierenberg

required an emergency operation, was in danger of
losing his life and is still recovering in the Frankfurt
hospital.

The TLD was targeted for the bloody assault
because of its outspoken support for the Red Army in
Afghanistan and its well-known opposition to Islamic
reaction.

After fighting their way out of the room, the TLD
comrades reassembled outside chanting, "Down with
NATO! Hail the Red Army!" They announced that a
TLD public meeting on Afghanistan scheduled for
January 29 would be held as planned, despite threats of
disruption from the Afghani reactionaries.

The TLD meeting was held, with substantial defense
by members of the iSt, and the attempt to impose the
norms of an "Islamic Republic" at Frankfurt Universi-
ty was successfully repelled. Members of several other
left organizations participated in the defense.

Like the pro-Khomeini Iranian students who last
year attempted to disrupt forums sponsored by the
Spartacist League/Spartacus Youth League of the
U.S., the Afghani reactionaries in Germany and their
Maoist accomplices will learn that the voice of
authentic Trotskyism will be heard. Drawing the
Russian question in blood, this attack has only steeled
the determination of the TLD to win new recruits to
Trotskyism. Hail the Red Army in Afghanistan!
Smash Islamic Reaction! We Will Not Be Silenced!

By giving unconditional military support to the Soviet
Army and PDPA forces, the Spartacist tendency in no way
places political confidence in the Kremlin bureaucracy or
its left-nationalist allies in Afghanistan. Only a proletarian
political revolution in the USSR can truly restore the Red
Army and the Soviet state to their internationalist and
revolutionary mission. Only the overthrow of the imperial-
ist powers by the working classes, under the leadership of a
Trotskyist vanguard party, can lay the basis for the world
socialist order which will lift deeply oppressed and
backward regions like Afghanistan out of their poverty,
isolation and obscurantism, establishing the genuine social
equality of all peoples. P

6

SPARTACIST

Rotten Blocs Shatter
United Secretariat

REPRINTED FROM WORKERS VANGUARD
NO. 245. 7 DECEMBER 1979

For the past decade and a half the main drawing card of
the "United Secretariat" (USec) has been its pretensions to
be the Fourth International. Even while its warring
factions were publicly hurling epithets at each other from
opposite sides of the barricades over Portugal in 1975, the
USec could still attract subjectively revolutionary militants
with its claim to be the organizational embodiment of the
world party of socialist revolution founded by Leon
Trotsky. And woe to any USec dissidents who challenged
this myth — over the years left oppositions have been
summarily chucked out for such sacrilege.

Now in the last two months the USec has been torn apart
over Nicaragua, with two blocs (each a marriage of
convenience, in true USec tradition) taking shape to claim
the title. For Ernest Mandel the split exploded his reveries
of presenting a "united" USec as an international clearing-
house for the "broad far left." The expellees and their new-
found allies are now as aggressive as the USec in presuming
to speak for "the world movement." Yet the counterposed
blocs are deeply unstable, both consisting of centrist-
talking adventurers (Mandel and Moreno) combined with
hard social-democratic reformist national machines (the
American SWP and the French OCI respectively).

On the USec side, its just concluded "Eleventh World
Congress" saw three main tendencies most clearly
expressed in their competing motions on the nature of the
present Sandinista/bourgeois government in Nicaragua.
The right wing around Jack Barnes' SWP praised the
present ruling junta in Managua as a workers and peasants
government; to cozy up to the FSLN (explicitly endorsed
as a "revolutionary leadership") the SWP acts as a
fingerman and political adviser to the Sandinista secret
police against supposed "ultra-lefts" (including its erst-
while Morenoite "comrades").

In the middle there was the grouping around Mandel,
saying in typical centrist fashion that the nature of the
Nicaraguan regime was undetermined. And there was
Mandel's left cover, the hodgepodge centered on the British
IMG, sections of the Swedish KAFand the Matti tendency
in the French LCR. These "loyal oppositionists" labeled
the Sandinista junta a bourgeois class-collaborationist
regime, but instead of calling for a Trotskyist party to
organize independent proletarian opposition in Nicaragua,
they accepted the U See's liquidationist policy of entry into
the petty-bourgeois bonapartist FSLN.

On the other side, the new lash-up between the French
OCI of Pierre Lambert and Nahuel Moreno's Bolshevik
Faction (BF) is one of the more unnatural alliances in
history. When Vishinsky ranted at the Moscow Trials
against a "bloc of rights and Trotskyites" it was a Stalinist
slander, but the OCI and Moreno have actually created
something worse; Trotsky and Bukharin had more in
common than this pair! Lambert's organization is a known
quantity among ostensible Trotskyists in Europe: its social-
democratic Stalinophobic politics meant eagerly support-
ing the candidate of the popular front. Socialist leader
Mitterrand, in the 1973 French presidential election. By
1975 the OCI's slide into reformism was sealed by its
support to the "democratic" CIA-funded Portuguese
Socialists as the latter spearheaded a counterrevolutionary
anti-Communist mass mobilization.

The Morenoite current is far more contradictory.
Moreno himself was a reformist in Argentina, but one who
lost his reformist base, the direct tie to his "own"
bourgeoisie. Forcibly separated from the national terrain
of Argentine reformism, with nothing to sell out and no
Peron to sell it to, Moreno — now based on the Colombian
PST — chose to embark on a leftist adventure in Nicaragua.
Now seeking to consolidate the benefits of his refurbished
militant reputation, Moreno has gone out on a centrist
swing. His Bolshevik Faction has been built on a left
critique of the Mandelites' response to "Eurocommunism"
and of the SWP over Portugal and Angola. On these

WINTER 1979-80

7

positions the BF sounds uncannily close to the positions of
the international Spartacist tendency — but it is a fraud:
Moreno is a consummate charlatan. We can prove it, and
we have, in the Moreno Truth Kit.

For some time now this Argentine political bandolero
had been sneaking up on Mandel, scurrying through the
bushes and then hiding under the skirts of a larger group,
only to break from it on a "left" basis when an appropriate
opportunity presents itself. First with the SWP (1969-75) in
the reformist, pseudo-orthodox "Leninist-Trotskyist
Faction" (which was at bottom a reformist opposition to
Mandel's vicarious guerrillaism), then in a more informal
way in bloc with Mandel. Each time he has extended his
influence: first to the rest of Latin America, then
establishing a beachhead on the southern flank of Europe.
Meanwhile his policies at home remained ultra-reformist
(written declarations of support to the Peronist regime,
equating left-wing guerrillas with fascist death squads,
etc.).

Now Moreno is at it again, this time with the OCI, and
the current bloc is even less stable than his previous
operations. Its components can't even agree on whether
they are for the "reconstruction," "reorganization" or
"reunification" of the Fourth International and Moreno
has admitted that his "Parity Committee" with the OCI is
nothing but a defensive "united front" — but one which
supposedly will proceed to build "Trotskyist parties"
despite its disagreements over fundamental political issues.
The "Parity Committee" is merely a cynical attempt to
trump the Mandelites by playing the "unity" card, and not
surprisingly the USec is invited to join up.

The uproar over Nicaragua has sent left-wing elements in
the USec into turmoil. Many afe being sucked into the
Moreno/OCI bloc, which on this issue stands to the left of

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From Left Peronism to Social Democracy

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Portugal, Angola,
Eurocommunism

■ Opportunist
Chameleon
Sui Generis

■ Moreno the Swindler

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Workers Vanguard

Sandinista diplomat Jaime Wheeiock in New York.
Spartacist spokesmen demanded, "Why are
revolutionaries in your jails?"

the usee's bottomless liquidation. Particularly in France a
number of leftists have joined the new Ligue Communiste
Internationaliste (LCI) despite its cynical OCI-loyalist
leadership. Elsewhere such elements are still being held in
tow by the USec (England, Sweden). Both in Spain and
Italy there are relatively large Morenoite breakaway
organizations, but ones whose political practice has been
exposed as clearly rightist.

But both the USec and Moreno/OCI blocs are showing a
suddenly increased vulnerability to the Spartacist
tendency. The response has been a wave of scummy cop-
baiting and thug violence in the worst Stalinist tradition.
Both the LCR and OCI recently used goon squads to
attempt to silence the Ligue Trotskyste de France. But
already this policy is beginning to backfire. Only four days
after the USec's GIM local in Koln, West Germany,
expelled our comrades of the Trotzkistische Liga Deutsch-
lands from a public forum, the GIM local in Tubingen at a
November 27 public meeting on Iran solidarized with the
TLD's proletarian opposition to clerical reaction in Iran.
No wonder Mandel told the last GIM conference that
regarding the future of his German section, "one can only
pray."

We can do more than pray. Over the years, serious leftist
USec supporters who sought an alternative to petty-
bourgeois impressionism and popular frontism have
regrouped themselves behind the authentic Trotskyist
program of the international Spartacist tendency. From
the Cuban Revolution to the clericalist mass mobilizations
in Iran and the insurgency in Nicaragua, our tendency has
counterposed the struggle for Trotskyist parties to the
Pabloist liquidationism of the USec. Now again this crisis
of the USec milieu provides opportunities to regroup
subjectively revolutionary militants from the USec into an
internationalist formation fighting for the rebirth of
Trotsky's Fourth International.!

8

SPARTACIST

SWP/USec Criminal Tailism in Iran

Khomeini's Persian-chauvinist militiamen bring the "Islamic revolution" to Kurdistan.

History Talces Its Vengeance

The following article first appeared in Workers Van-
guard No. 239, 14 September 1979. It exposes how the
United Secretariat (USec) criminally capitulated to the
reactionary mullah-led "Islamic revolution" in Iran, even
as 14 members of the USec's affiliate languished in
Khomeini's jails awaiting execution. Since this article was
first published, several important developments have taken
place which require comment — the American embassy
crisis in Iran, the international crisis precipitated by the
Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan, and the split in
the USec leading to the formation of the "Parity
Committee" lashing together the Bolshevik Faction (BF) of
political adventurer Nahuel Moreno and the reformist
Organisation Communiste Internationaliste (OCI) of
Pierre Lambert.

The persecution of the USec's Iranian affiliate, the
Socialist Workers Party (HKS), in late summer-early fall
was part of the Khomeini regime's response to growing
mass discontent and resistance. Once again leftist protest-
ers were marching through Teheran, unemployed workers
staging militant demonstrations and, most threatening to
Khomeini, the national minorities (especially the Kurds)
were rebelling. It was against this background that in late
October Khomeini encouraged his followers to seize the
American embassy, hold its personnel hostage and demand
the return of the shah. Through this spectacular political

diversion the reactionary religious fanatic could once again
appear before the Iranian people as the enemy of the hated
shah and U.S. imperialism. In fact, the embassy seizure was
an attempt to shore up his regime, specifically designed to
ensure Khomeini's victory in the upcoming referendum
making him the all-powerful faghi (Fiihrer), supposedly
allah's chosen leader over the people of Iran. The
essentially diversionary nature of the embassy seizure was
recognized by the leftist Fedayeen in Iran and even by the
European Mandelites in the USec.

But not the SWP. They rushed to the newly elected,
imam's defense, claiming, "Khomeini today has the greatest
authority in the country as an anti-imperialist leader"
(Militant, 28 December 1979). Therefore, argued the SWP,
any criticism of Khomeini, even from the left, was pro-
imperialist. This timeworn Stalinist methodology was
dragged out of mothballs for the 1 7 December issue of the
SWP's Intercontinental Press in an article entitled, "How
the Left Responded to Carter's War Drive." The article's
wildest slanders are reserved for the Spartacist League,
which it claimed has "increasingly taken outright racist and ^
pro-imperialist positions" because we expose Khomeini's
crimes against the Iranian oppressed and call for workers
revolution in Iran.

As demonstrated in our reply, "Why They Lie for
Khomeini" {Workers Vanguard No. 246, 28 December

WINTER 1979-80

9

1979), the SWP's reasoning is but the mirror image of
liberal imperialist ideology. If Khomeini is guilty of the
crimes we accuse him of, if the Iranian masses suffer under
the burden of religious obscurantism, then in the eyes of the
SWP this could only serve to justify bringing "human
rights" to the Iranian people by sending in the U.S.
marines. Communists reject this liberal imperialist syllo-
gism; we said: "Khomeini Nuttier Than Shah, But Hands
Off Iran!" Under the guise of combating imperialist
chauvinism, the SWP denies the social reality of backward,
capitalist Iran: the chador becomes a symbol of women's
"liberation" rather than of their enslavement in Islamic
countries, self-flagellation as a Shi'ite rite practiced during
the holy month of Moharram and witnessed by millions on
television is an outright fabrication of the Wall Street
Journal. Claiming that hostility toward Khomeini's Iran in
the U.S. is solely the creation of imperialist media
fabrication, the Militant would save Iran from U.S.
invasion by its own media manipulation. Marxists
understand that the social force of clerical reaction in Iran
today is a product of economic retardation imposed upon
that region by imperialism and that the masses will be
emancipated from the chains of religious obscurantism
only upon the economic foundations of proletarian
revolution.

Likewise,' the HKS also hailed the embassy takeover.
T?n of the fourteen imprisoned HKS members were
released. Meanwhile, the HKS underwent a split essentially
pitting the pro-SWP elements, largely trained as students
in the U.S., against the Mandelite centrists, mainly derived
from Iranian students in Europe. The issue which
precipitated the split was the pro-SWP leadership's
insistence on standing for the Islamic Assembly of Experts
last August against the will of the majority of the group,
who favored a boycott.

If the seizure of the American embassy momentarily
refurbished Khomeini's credentials as an "anti-
imperialist," the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan utterly
exploded that fraudulent image. The president of the
United States is now obsequiously wooing the imam for a
joint jihad against godless Russia. Carter might just
propose that the embassy hostages be drafted into the
Iranian army and sent to fight the Soviets at the Khyber.
For his part, Khomeini has pledged "unconditional
support" to the anti-Soviet Afghan tribalist's and, in fact,
has been aiding them all along.

In supporting the clerical reactionary Khomeini, the left
was not only hypnotized by his mass following, but
believed his anti-Westernism would surely tear Iran out of
America's hands. But as Afghanistan proves, conflicts
between the deeply conservative Islamic priest caste and
their imperialist overlords can only have a fleeting and
superficial character. When faced with Cold War polariza-
tion linked to the possibility of social revolution in the East,
the mullahs will always unite with imperialism against the
Soviet degenerated workers state.

Khomeini's fake-Trotskyist enthusiasts either deny this
or join him on the anti-Communist side of the barricades.
While the SWP defends the Soviet action in Afghanistan,
it denies that the anti-Communist, feudalist insurgency is
based on Islamic fundamentalism. As for Carter's anti-
Soviet offensive, the SWP tries to duck the Russian
continued on next page

Morenoites Call For
Counterrevolution
In USSR

Some would-be Trotskyists might think the
Moreno tendency is leftist because it sent a brigade
to Nicaragua and parades around in guerrilla
outfits. Then take a look at the Morenoites' call for
counterrevolution in Russia based on their support
to Khomeini. Of all groups on the left this is the
only one that tries to outdo the crazed anti-
Communism of Brzezinski:

"The counterrevolutionary Kremlin bureaucracy is
discrediting itself by a criminal action against the
Afghan people, trampling its right to independence,
intervening on its territory without any justification.
Defense against external action was not the motive
in telling the USSR to intervene, but, on the
contrary, an obvious attempt to reinforce its own
control, to maintain the status quo in the area
shaken, by revolutionary ferment. The possibility of
extending the Iranian revolution within the borders
of the USSR is what terrorizes the Kremlin
bureaucracy. The Soviet border populations, tied to
those in Iran and Afghanistan by religious, cultural
and racial ties, can be infected by the radicalization
of the area, can become protagonists in an anti-
bureaucratic mobilization within the workers state,
laying the basis for a political revolution. This is
what the bureaucracy is afraid of, this is why the
USSR intervened."

— Avanzata Proletaria No. 28,
12 January 1980

This is no isolated deviation (and what a devia-
tion!) by the Morenoites' Italian group. The Parity
Committee of the Morenoite/Lambertist bloc calls
for the Soviet army to withdraw and leave its arms
with the Islamic anti-Communist guerrillas!

"The revolutionary wave born in Iran could only
have destabilizing effects in Afghanistan. If religion
can be included as an element of national affirma-
tion, the movement which allows a rebellion to
develop against the central power is not, any more
than in Iran, a 'religious' movement. It takes part in
the totality of the mobilization of the masses in this
region, and directs itself against a state which

remains a semi-colonial bourgeois state

"If it were a question of aiding the struggle of the
Afghan people to realize their national and social
aspirations in opposition to imperialism, the rulers
of the USSR would need only order their troops to
leave their weapons in the hands of the Afghan mass
revolutionary movement."

— Informations Ouvrieres,
19-26 January 1980
This shrill anti-Sovietism must please the notoriously
Stalinophobic French OCI with whom Moreno has
blocked to split the United Secretariat. But any
radical who thinks that Moreno represents any kind
of revolutionary Trotskyism had better think again.
You might find yourself in the mountains of
Afghanistan fighting in an "Imam Khomeini Bri-
gade" against the godless Communist menace. ■

10

SPARTACIST

question, declaring that "the issue is not Soviet
intervention."

The unstable "Parity Committee" has followed Khomei-
ni into the camp of imperialist counterrevolution,
supporting the reactionary Islamic forces in Afghanistan
(see accompanying box). For the Lambertists, this is a
culmination of their long-standing social-democratic
Stalinophobia. For the Morenoites, their position was
consistent with their identification with third worldist
bonapartist nationalism, even in its most reactionary, anti-
Communist forms.

While posturing as a left opposition within the USec, the
BF of Moreno was, if anything, even more enthusiastic
over Khomeini's "Islamic revolution" than was the SWP.
The Bolshevik Faction hailed the Persian mullahs'
revolution and criticized the Mandelite/SWP bloc for
minimizing its world-historic import:

"The United Secretariat has been categorically,
theoretically, and politically contradicted by the Iranian
revolution, which has been the most spectacular example
of an upsurge to be seen in recent years. . . .
". . . the Iranian revolution once again shifts the epicenter
of world revolution to the colonial world."

— "Declaration and Platform of the Bolshevik
Faction," International Internal Discussion
Bulletin Vol. XVI No. 3, July 1979

For the would-be Trotskyist "imam" from Argentina,
Khomeini (like Peron) is merely another "progressive, anti-
imperialist" caudillo whose corporatist institutions can
supposedly serve as the foundation for "proletarian" rule.
Now with the Afghanistan crisis, the Morenoites have
carried their belief in the world-historic mission of the
Persian mullahs' revolution to the point of calling for its
extension to the border peoples of the Soviet Union!

The Mandelite centrists are zigzagging between class-
treasonqus calls for Soviet withdrawal (tailing the
Eurocommunist milieu) and the grudging admission that
Afghanistan does pose the military defense of the USSR
against imperialism. The initial response of the British
International Marxist Group was to demand, "Soviet
Troops Out of Afghanistan!" in the name of national self-
determination. As if the democratic right of national self-
determination stands higher than the defeat of feudalist
counterrevolution or the military defense of the Soviet
Union! The organ of the USec's premier French section.

Rouge, takes a different line on Afghanistan every week,
sometimes two different lines in the same issue. But, even if
they now abjure the defeatist call for the withdrawal of the
Red Army, the European Mandelites still condemn the
Soviet intervention. In sharpest contrast, we recognize that
the Soviet intervention opens the possibility of the social
liberation of the peoples of Afghanistan and is a fully
justifiable defensive response to U.S. imperialism's present
war drive.

« 41 Hi * * He

They bowed to their executioners.

As Ayatollah Khomeini rose to power in Iran following
the overthrow of the bloody shah, the American Socialist
Workers Party (SWP) emblazoned a headline hailing this
event across the front page of its newspaper, a headline
which will be immortaUzed in the annals of class treachery:
"VICTORY IN IRAN!" {Militant, 23 February). So whose
victory now, SWP?

Every day since the fall of the Peacock Throne events in
Iran have confirmed that the spoils of this "victory" are the
savage repression of minorities, the execution of strikers,
homosexuals, adulterers and others accused of "crimes
against god"; the stoning of unveiled women, the
suppression of all opposition parties and press. The current
slaughter of hundreds of Kurds in northwestern Iran is only
the most recent repressive measure of this Shi'ite theocracy
in consolidating its victory.

The international Spartacist tendency (iSt) was unique
on the left in telling the truth which every day receives
confirmation in Khomeini's "Islamic Republic": the
mullahs' victory means a regime just as reactionary as the
shah's. In contrast, the SWP and its co-thinkers in the
Iranian HKS (Socialist Workers Party) disguised and
obscured at every stage the reactionary character of
Khomeini's Islamic fundamentalist regime. Today the
HKS is experiencing the consequences of the "victory" it
cheered only six months ago as it, along with other left and
secular groups, has had its offices sacked and closed, its
fwess suppressed, its members beaten, jailed and threatened
with execution.

Despite the fact that brutal Islamic repression against the
left, women, national minorities and homosexuals began
on Day 1 of the mullahs' regime, the egregiously misnamed
"United Secretariat of the Fourth International" (USec), to
which both the American SWP and Iranian HKS are
"fraternally" affiliated, characterized the ayatollah as
"progressive" and "anti-imperialist." Even Khomeini's
attack on their HKS comrades brought forth a desultory
response. The one thing the SWP did energetically was to
exclude Spartacists from defense of the threatened Iranian
socialists. Only now that it has finally dawned on these
inveterate tailists, blinded by their opportunism, that they
may actually have to pay for their treachery has the USec
belatedly sprung to life and begun screaming from the
pages of their newspapers, "Stop Execution of Socialists in
Iran!"

In time-honored reformist fashion they are trying to
cover their tracks by playing up the threat hanging over the
arrested HKSers. The Stalinists used the same ploy
following the 1973 Pinochet coup, trying to focus protests
on freeing imprisoned Communist leader Corvaldn. The
iSt, which defended Corvaldn, also pointed out that the

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11

Spartacist League/Britain
demonstrates in London
(1 September 1979) to
protest Khomeini's white
terror against Kurds, Arab
oil worlcers, imprisoned
HKS members and other
leftists.

Chilean CP's call for confidence in the "constitutionalist"
officer corps paved the way for bloody counterrevolution.
Again today we point the finger of guilt. The HKS' present
plight was prepared by their own criminal policy. The real
story is: their comrades are not just martyrs — they are
sacrificial victims of the USec's support for Khomeini.

But these gentlemen socialists don't like to talk about
responsibility for crimes. Speaking recently in the United
States, USec leader Ernest Mandel reacted angrily to
Spartacist accusations that he and his organization had
betrayed the working class with its support to popular
frontism in Chile, Portugal and elsewhdre:

"I don't see any workers struggles betrayed by the

organization I stand for The word 'betrayals' is

completely out of order You can say it was a wrong

policy, or a political mistake. But to speak about
betrayals— you can't put in the same category people who
are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands
and millions of workers."

For seminar socialists like Mandel, words do not have
consequences. If the USec called for Latin American youth
to go into the hills to follow Guevara's bankrupt guerrilla
strategy, if the SWP supported the counterrevolutionary
mobilization spearheaded by the CIA-bankrolled Portu-
guese socialists — no matter, it's just a "political mistake."

No, it is a betrayal — of the proletariat, of Marxism, of
anyone who follows your advice. And that is what has
taken place in Iran. True, the USec is not influential
enough to lead "hundreds of thousands and millions of
workers to their deaths" — but at least 14 of its own
supporters in the Iranian HKS are now facing life
imprisonment or sitting on death row, jailed by the regime
whose victory was greeted by these pseudo-Trotskyist
tailists.

USec, SWP, HKS— Ernest Mandel, Jack Barnes and the
rest: you have committed a crime, for which you will be
held responsible before the court of history. You must live
with it because your own comrades may die for it.

Cover-Up

After working for months to disguise the reactionary
character of Khomeini's Islamic regime, the USec is now
desperately trying to shift its line without anybody
noticing. Today Socialist Challenge (30 August), newspa-

per of the British International Marxist Group (IMG),
proclaims in bold letters across its back page, "White
Terror in Iran," and announces "Khomeini has become the
Shah of Iran." The IMG neglects to inform us how this
reactionary regime came to replace Khomeini's "progres-
sive" rule which it applauded only yesterday. Similarly,
Rouge (24-30 August), newspaper of the French Ligue
Communiste Revolutionnaire, goes so far as to speak of
Khomeini's "coup de force." Against himself?

For its part, the U.S. Socialist Workers Party is also
moving (albeit more slowly) to dissociate itself from the
bloody ayatollah. Today they write:

"Khomeini's moves against the Iranian working people —
aimed to protect the ill-gotten gains of the landlords and
capitalists — lead him toward subordination to U.S.
imperialism, in spite of the anti-imperialist posture he has
tried to adopt up to now."

—Militant, 7 September 1979

But it was the SWP which was the foremost con man on the
American left for "Khomeini's anti-imperialist posture."
Less than one year ago the SWP hailed Khomeini in the
Militant (17 November 1978) as "progressive":

"Although Khomeini subscribes to a religious ideology,
the basis of his appeal is not religious reaction. On the
contrary, he has won broad support among the Iranian
masses because his firm opposition to the Shah and the
Shah's 'modernization' is progressive."

The SWP is so ensconced in its cocoon of bourgeois-
democratic illusions that it does not recognize the burning
importance of the separation of church and state for
backward countries. Khomeini's religious ideology is his
political program: i.e., an Islamic fundamentalist theocra-
cy based on Great Persian chauvinism and the moral codes
of desert bedouins.

When the iSt told the truth about what the victory of
Islamic reaction would mean and raised the slogan: "Down
With the Shah! Down With the Mullahs!" the SWP
claimed we were "blinded by sectarianism" and "chauvin-
ist." But the real chauvinists were those who refused to do
their internationalist duty and warn the Iranian toiling
masses that Khomeini's "Islamic Revolution" would prove
no more progressive than the shah's "White Revolution."
For many sections of the oppressed (e.g., religious
continued on next page

12

SPARTACIST

minorities and women), it has already proven more
repressive. This is even acknowledged in the SWP's own
publications.

A recent issue of Intercontinental Press (10 September
1979) contains a translation from a report made by a
prominent Algerian lawyer who visited prisoners held in
Karoun Prison located in Khuzistan which contains Iran's
Arab minority. Arab prisoners are reported as explaining:
"... that the Iranian revolution meant no change as far as
they were concerned. For them the exactions of the old
regime, based on the local feudal rulers continue,
oppressing them both economically and socially. The same
feudal rulers today are allied with the officials of the new
regime, creating a continuity of repression."

Where is the "victory" for the Arab minority of Khuiistan,
criminal opportunists of the SWF?

Theocratic Parliamentary Cretinism

The HKS tried to present its credentials as a loyal social-
democratic opposition to the dictatorship of the mullahs by
running in the August elections for the so<alled Assembly
of Experts. But in a theocracy, social democracy doesn't
pay, even for short-sighted, narrow-minded opportunists.
According to the election statement in the last issue of the
HKS paper Kargar (Worker) prinled before its suppression
and dated 8 August;

"Three days from now, elections will be held for the
Assembly of Experts. This body is to ratify a new

constitution for Iran This constitution must defend the

gains of the revolution and extend them The new

constitution must pave the way for the establishment of
such a government of the oppressed majority."

In fact, the Assembly of Experts was bound by
Khomeini's phony referendum for an Islamic Republic,
which explicitly ruled out a constituent assembly. The
Assembly of Experts could only amend Khomeini's draft
constitution consistent with institutionalizing the Islamic
Republic, and the political and social hegemony of the
mullahs. The Assembly of Experts was no more a
consituent assembly than is the college of cardinals. Nor
was it any more democratically "elected" than that
appendage of the papacy. ,

Given the predetermined outcome of a Shi'ite clerical
dictatorship, many political parties of secular groups and
minorities boycotted the elections, including all the Arab
parties. Even the main liberal bourgeois party, the National
Democratic Front (NDF), refused to participate as "a
protest in principle against the revolutionary regime's lack
of attention to basic human rights." In Iranian Kurdistan
less than ten percent of the eligible voters cast ballots. Thus,
the HKS presented the ludicrous spectacle of self-
proclaimed "Trotskyists" running for a seat in the
Assembly of Experts next to mullahs who were arguing
over whether this or that clause was consistent with the
Koran.

The 10 September issue of Intercontinental Press quotes
long passages from the last issue of Kargar enthusing over
the HKS participation in the elections of Islamic "experts."
But the SWF suppresses the existence of an article in the
same issue of Kargar entitled, "Last Minute Before
Publication," which states that: "There is a very important
discussion in the party whether to boycott or participate in
the elections of the Assembly of Experts." Apparently,
participating in the elections for the rubber-stamp

"assembly" of the Islamic Republic was so unsavory that "
even a significant section of the mullah-tailist HKS balked.
The Kargar article reports: "As is well known, three of our
18 candidates boycotted the elections."

Fruits of Betrayal

In covering up for Khomeini's reactionary regime and
their own record on Khomeini, it is the SWF that has been
forced to resort to deliberate lying. A typical piece of
slanderous rubbish about that "irrelevant sect," the
Spartacist League, that has come to fill so many pages of
the Militant lately is a piece in the 6 July issue entitled
"Spartacists Foiled in Attempt to Sabotage Defense."
According to the article, the SL was excluded from a picket
to protest the jailing of the HKS because it brought
"provocative signs." Through partial quotation the SWP
distorts the slogans on the signs: "Overthrow Islamic
Reaction" and "Down with Khomeini," instead of "For
Workers Revolution to Overthrow Islamic Reaction" and
"Down with Khomeini, For Workers Revolution."

According to the SWP, these slogans "were a clear echo
of imperialist propaganda against the Iranian workers and
peasants" — from which one can only deduce that the SWP
believes that the Carter administration is calling for
workers revolution in Iran. The article states that the SL
was "told by picket organizers that the protest was not open
to opponents of the Iranian revolution" — i.e., Khomeini's
"Islamic Revolution." Appropriately enough, according to
SWP methodology, in order to "defend" the jailed HKS
militants one must simultaneously defend their torturers,
jailers and potential executioners — or at least not attack
them openly!

The SWF's international bloc partners in the so-called
United Secretariat do not have a better record. In a heated
exchange with supporters of the SL and its youth section,
the Spartacus Youth League, at Boston University on July
17, Mandel defended the SWP's "Victory in Iran" headline
by stating:

"So some of our comrades are in jail — but our organiza-
tion is legal. Our paper is legal; it is sold in tens of
thousands of copies like all other left-wing papers in Iran.
Were they legal under the shah?. . . So what you have is a
step from a reactionary dictatorship, which was bourgeois,
towards what you could call partial bourgeois democra-
cy We said that it is the beginning of the process of

permanent revolution — "

— IVVNo. 237, 3 August
One month later the HKS, along with all other left and
secular organizations, was illegal, its press banned, its
leaders in jail. Is that what you call the next stage in the
"process of permanent revolution," Professor Mandel?

The national secretary of the pro-Mandel IMG in
England, Brian Grogan, was so swept up in the "process of
permanent revolution" when he was in Teheran that he
joined the chador-covered women and the men carrying
icons of Khomeini and chanted "allah akbar" ("god is
great"). At a recent demonstration against Khomeini's
terror in front of the Iranian embassy in London, called by
a Kurdish student association and endorsed by the IMG,
Grogan's disgusting action was not forgotten. As the IMG
supporters present — a small fraction of their local
membership, in the midst of the USec's supposed
"emergency campaign" — stood by, the 50-strong contin-
gent of the Spartacist League/ Britain chanted: "2, 4, 6, 8— .

%INTER 1979-80

13

Reza/Sipa-Black Star

Iranian left's tailing of Khomeini only emboldened Muslim zealots. Above: pipe-swinging, rock- throwing
thugs attacic leftists in Teheran.

Does Grogan still think god is great?" Another SL chant
was: "Last autumn you said Khomeini's fine, it's kind of
late to change your line."

The central slogan carried on the SL/B placards was:
"USec/IMG Line Kills Arabs, Kurds, Leftists." Other
Spartacist signs included: "You Cheered for Khomeini, But
You're Not Cheering Now," "Free the HKS and Fedayeen
Supporters" and "Khomeini's Revolution Means Massacre
of Kurds." On several occasions, when SLers and the
Kurdish students jointly chanted "Down with the new
shah" and "Down with Khomeini, for workers revolu-
tion," the IMG tried to drown this out with slogans which
did not attack the ayatollah. Not only do these fake-
Trotskyisfs refuse to directly denounce the mullahs' rule,
but they have sabotaged the defense of their own
imprisoned comrades in Iran. The IMG waited a month to
call its first defense demonstration (on July 7), and then
sent only a handful of supporters to the protest.

On the face of it, the USec "defense" of their comrades
would seem sectarian and defeatist — if one supposes that
their concern was to defend imprisoned leftists. But then
the USec at most gave lip service to defense of the
Fedayeen, a far larger irritant to the Khomeini regime,
when they came under attack. The HKS also abandoned
the demand for the Kurdish right of self-determination
when things got hot. No, their central aim is to defend
Khomeini. And the ultimate price of their betrayal has not
been paid by them — as of yet — but by the oppressed masses
of Iran. But now they appeal for support.

Last fall as the mullah-led opposition gained force, the
iSt warned that the Islamic clerics were as reactionary as
the butcher shah. But when we said "Down with the shah,
down with the mullahs!" the USec/SWP replied that this is
imperialist propaganda, that we were apologists for the

shah. In February, when we said "Mullahs Win" the SWP
proclaimed "Victory in Iran" and denounced the iSt
position as "counterrevolutionary." We said "Your
comrades may die, but you support Khomeini," and the
fake-Trotskyists physically expelled us from "private"
picket lines defending the HKS, refusing to march with
anyone who doesn't swear fealty to the "imam." You
bowed to Khomeini and while you were kneeling the
executioner comes along and is about to cut off your heads.
So now you want sympathy for your plight.

All those concerned for democratic rights must demand
freedom for imprisoned Kurdish partisans, Arab oil
workers, HKS members and other leftists, and all victims
of Khomeini's reactionary terror. But the working class
must never forget those fake-lefts who claimed Khomeini
as a "progressive" alternative to the shah, who hoped to
ride to popularity or power on the coattails of Islamic
reaction. They are covered with blood.

Even Stalin criticized Chiang Kai-shek after the
Shanghai massacre. The USec's sudden discovery that
Khomeini is not so progressive after all outdoes Stalin
himself in hypocrisy. Chiang Kai-shek claimed to be a
revolutionary nationalist and friend of the Russian
Revolution when he was courting Stalin's support. But
Khomeini stated from the very beginning that he was a
reactionary Islamic fundamentalist and Great Persian
chauvinist who sought to crush the "satanic communists."
The criminal opportunism of the USec over Iran cannot be
buried beneath its present (still half-hearted) criticisms and
cries for international solidarity for its own supporters in
Iran who are as much victims of its own wretched line as
they are of capitalist terror. The rebirth of the Fourth
International depends upon burning this betrayal and its
consequences into the collective memory of the Marxist
movement. ■

14

SPARTACIST

Tibet: Mao's Afghanistan

Maoists all over the world are screaming about Soviet
"imperialism" subjugating "poor little" Afghanistan. Yet 20
years ago the Chinese deformed workers state had to quell
an analogous uprising of Buddhist monks, feudal landlords
and tribesmen in Tibet. The then-Trotskyist Young Socialist
Alliance (YSA) denounced the imperialist propaganda
campaign for the Tibetan counterrevolutionaries. We
reprint a leaflet issued by the Eugene V. Debs Club of
Berkeley, California and the East Bay YSA (Young
Socialist, June 1959). It occasioned some reaction in the
local radical milieu as it was known to have been written by
Jim Robertson, a former long-time Shachtmanite "third
campist," as his first statement of Trotskyist Soviet
defensism.

*****

A hue and cry has gone up throughout the "free" world
and especially in the United States over the latest alleged
atrocity of the Chinese (Communist) government. This
"atrocity" is the attempt, assured of final success, to rees-
tablish Chinese dominance in the face of revolt planned
and led by the Tibetan priestly and landowning classes.

The situation is clear enough in broad outline. To their
discredit, the Chinese government has attempted to
conciliate with the Tibetan feudal classes for the past eight
years. At the same time, as the product of a revolutionary
upheaval, the Chinese regime brings with it certain
reforms. These reforms, such as rudimentary education,
threatened the age-old system of oppression of the peasants
by the native rulers. These latter worthies, headed by their
"god-king," feh undermined, and while they still had at
least a measure of popular support staged a coup which ran
into Chinese military resistance.

As an aside to those in the West who profess to admire
the quaint devotion of the more backward in Asia to their
religious leaders, let it be noted that these condescending
attitudes went out with the "humble, devout" French serf of
before 1789 and the "carefree, contented" Negro slaves in
America. Oppression and obscurantism that lead to
blighted and shortened lives are vicious. The path of
human betterment is through increasing men's understand-
ing and control of their universe, not by use of rosaries and
prayer wheels.

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Several defenses have been put forward in favor of the
Tibetan feudalists. (1) "Freedom and democracy"!! When
in the last two thousand years have the Tibetan people
voted or been asked about anything? The very revolt was in
part against the eventual possibility of that sort of thing.

(2) "Another Hungary". In- Hungary the revolution
fought to go forward, seeking to smash the Stalinist
bureaucracy (the brothers of Mao and company) in favor
of rule from below and for socialism, and against the old
order of great landed estates, privately owned factories,
clericalism, and political rule by Admiral Horthy's fascist
gang.

(3) "Self-determination" might have been a serious basis
for deciding in favor of Tibetan independence could
someone figure out how the Tibetan people are to express
their choice in a nation where the "god-king" gives all the
answers as well as asks all the questions. But in reality this
aspect is without meaning.

The real choice for Tibet if Chinese control were thrown
off is not independent nationhood but abject dependence
on American arms, money and advisors. One has but to
look at the other reactionary and feudal regimes in Asia to
see both the reality and meaning of American imperialist
domination: the military dictatorships in Pakistan and
Thailand, the corrupt "democracies" of Viet Nam and the
Philippines, the personal tyrannies in South Korea and
Formosa. Not a pretty picture.

The victory of the Chinese Communist government is
clearly the progressive choice in the present contest.
However, to recognize this is not to whitewash that regime.
But even in its distorted way it is part of great and positive
changes on the Asian mainland, changes that eventually
will be the Maoists' own undoing. Through these very
achievements the regime will be overthrown by the mass of
people anxious to rule their own destinies without the
intervention of a privileged elite. That is the future; the
Tibetan monk-rulers are the past.

But what about the hue and cry in America? HoW easily
fine words are twisted to meet the needs of American
"world leadership"! How morally corrupt our public
figures are, men whose political complexion runs the entire
respectable spectrum. Nationally a pro-Tibetan committee
has been set up ranging in composition from the Formosa
lobby mouthpiece, Henry Luce of Life-Timei-Fortune, to
Norman Thomas, accurately described as "the State
Department socialist." At California, the self-styled
"Tibetan Brigade" has sprung up and in its publicity
seeking fashion faithfully echoes the rhetoric of their
elders.

All this noise in a country that backs dictators the world
over and as in Guatemala forcibly puts puppets into power
with plots staged by the Counter Intelligence Agency. And
at a time when, to take a most outstanding example, in
Algeria, a whole people have been waging a desperate,
bloody war for years against fascist colonials and an
imperialist army supplied with American arms.

Here is hypocrisy of world-historic proportions. We
socialists say: no thank you! ■

WINTER 1979-80

15

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16

SPARTACIST

Singing of the "Internationale" concludes first delegated conference of the iSt.

Forward to the International
Trotskylst League

(continued from page 40)

splits and back again, the iSt has grown and grown
stronger.

The iSt was formally constituted with the adoption in
1974 of the "Declaration for the Organizing of an
International Trotskyist Tendency" (DOITT) which
stated:

"The international Spartacist tendency is just that, a
tendency in the process of consolidation. But from its
international outset it declares its continuing fidelity
already tested for a decade in national confines to Marxist-
Leninist principle and Trotskyist program-
Revolutionary, Internationalist and Proletarian. The
struggle for the rebirth of the Fourth International
promises to be difficult, long and, above all, uneven. ..."
This document set forth the programmatic bankruptcy of
the various "Fourth Internationals" and committed the
signatory organizations to the struggle for an International
Trotskyist League in accordance with- international
democratic centralism. The appendix established an
interim organizational structure for the tendency, with the
combined Central Committees of the full sections (initially ,
U.S. and Australia/New Zealand) constituted as an
International Executive Committee (lEC) with an interim
International Secretariat as its resident executive arm.
While recognizing that this formally federated structure
could become a brake on the democratic-centralist
development of the tendency, we hoped that the election of
a fully representative lEC by a delegated international

conference would coincide with the fusion of the iSt—
programmatic nucleus of a reborn Fourth International—
with some section of cadres drawn from the historic forces
of the Trotskyist movement; thus would be founded an
International Trotskyist League possessing broader
authority among would-be Trotskyist currents.

In the period since the promulgation of DOITT, the
tendency has registered considerable international exten-
sion. The winning of young Trotskyist cadres in Austria
combined with regroupments from German ostensible
Trotskyism (mainly from the decomposition products of
the left-USec milieu) created the TLD. Recruitment from
the USec organizations in Canada and France led to the
founding of the TLC and LTF. Spartacist "stations" were
established in London and Stockholm. A substantial
fusion with forces from the English Workers Socialist
League created the SL/B. While these gains did not
constitute the qualitative political or geographical expan-
sion to justify the proclamation of an International
Trotskyist League, they exacerbated the anomalous
situation of a nominally federated leadership structure
directing the work of our disciplined democratic-centralist
tendency.

In the period prior to the convening of the 1979
conference, the participation of leading comrades, includ-
ing those from sympathizing sections, in international
deliberations had demonstrated the existence of an
authoritative leading collective. At the same time, the hard
and cohesive political response of all the sections to world
events like Iran's "Islamic revolution" increasingly com-
pelled our fake-Trotskyist opponents to recognize the iSt
as a united international political entity. An international

WINTEM 979-80

17

Spartacist

conference to elect a representative lEC of the iSt was
overdue.

The conference was prepared by national conferences
and plenums of the full and sympathizing sections, which
elected the voting delegates. Immediately preceding the
two-day international conference was a four-day interna-
tional summer camp which included educationals, panels
and special commissions (e.g., finances, press, student
work).

The conference proper opened with greetmgs from each
national section and from the youth section of the SL/ U . S . ,
the Spartacus Youth League. The greetings reported the
results of the preparatory national gatherings and outhned
the priorities, problems and perspectives for the sections'
work. In general, the European organizations confront the
related tasks of forging effective national leading collec-
tives, geographical expansion and press stabilization. It
was agreed that regular, at least monthly sectional
newspapers are crucial propaganda vehicles of an aggres-
sive regroupment tactic of polarizing centrist organiza-
tions and winning their subjectively revolutionary forces to
the program of authentic Trotskyism.

The pressing tasks in Europe contrast with those of the
larger U.S. section which in the course of a dozen years has
mainly regrouped its unstable centrist opponents out of
effective existence. Thus the SL/U.S. greetings outhned a
domestic perspective of more or less individual recruitment
through an aggressive drive to turn the tendency's political
capital into a couple of hundred new members.

Following the greetings, the conference considered the
main political document (reprinted elsewhere in this issue).
Particularly in light of the recent USec split, consolidation

of the European organizations is closely linked to the
struggle to turn the sections outward toward rapid
recruitment to the iSt. The iSt must strip from the Moreno
current its new-found "leftist" mantle and win genuine
leftists to the one tendency which has consistently opposed
Pabloist liquidationism, popular frontism and petty-
bourgeois radical impressionism. We must expose Moreno
as a free-floating Argentine nationalist /reformist whose
present pretenses to "left opposition" are akin to the left
face presented by the German Social Democrats whose
reformist terrain had been cut out from under them by
Hitler's ascension. Now, however, over Afghanistan the
Morenoites have shown their true character, stripping off
their transient pseudo-left cover. In the name of Third
World nationalism they are supporting the imperialist-
backed Islamic reactionaries against the Soviet army. If the
Morenoites were to succeed in pulling behind them would-
be Trotskyists repelled by the rightism of the USec, a
verbally centrist roadblock to principled regroupment
would undercut iSt opportunities for rapid growth and
postpone the construction of authentic revolutionary
proletarian nuclei in important countries of Europe and
Latin America.

An extremely stimulating session dealt with the question
of how the workers movement can confront the problem of
massive unemployment in industries which have become
redundant not merely through the vicissitudes of the trade
cycle (e.g., the worldwide "Great Depression" of 1929) but
due to changes in technology creating semi-fossilized
industries and/ or shifts in the capacity of competing
national industries to maintain their share of the world
continued on next page

18

SPARTACIST

Spartacist League/
Britain marcliing in
Birmingham
demonstration
protesting

victimization of Derek
Robinson, prominent
CP union leader at
British Leyland

market. In the outmoded steel/coal region of Northwest
France/ South Belgium or the British automotive industry,
for example, the processes of economic change which once
carved out these historic proletarian centers from a former
peasantry now threaten to pauperize pr even lumpenize
whole regional sectors of the working class. The revolu-
tionary Marxists must simultaneously defend the real
livehhoods and conditions of work of the workers while
adamantly refusing to be sucked into taking responsibility
for the capitalist economy, no matter how Labourite itis
governmental label.

The second conference day had been allocated to
discussion of a proposal of fusion between the iSt and the
Ceylonese RWP. However, the political conduct of the
RWP delegates during the camp/conference and their
abrupt departure had already made the outcome a
foregone conclusion.

"National Communism"

A major outcome of the conference was a definitive
political evaluation of the Samarakkody grouping — with
which the iSt had maintained a several-year inconclusive
fraternal relationship — as an encysted national left-centrist
clot. In the course of his long political history, Comrade
Samarakkody had pursued a generally honorable course,
but — confronted with the challenge of partaking of an
international struggle for the rebirth of the Fourth
International — he proved unable to make the leap.
As Trotsky explained:

"By its very nature opportunism is nationalistic, since it
rests on the local and temporary needs of the proletariat
and not on its historic tasks. Opportunists find interna-
tional control intolerable and they reduce their interna-
tional ties as much as possible to harmless formalities . . . on
the proviso that each group does not hinder the others
from conducting an opportunist policy to its own national

task International unity is not a decorative fa9ade for

us, but the very axis of our theoretical views and our
policy."

— L. Trotsky, "The Defense of the Soviet Union and
the Opposition," 7 September 1929

Exposure of the Ceylonese delegation's retreat from the
RWP's previous protestations of deepening convergence
with the program of the iSt was a central focus of the
conference. We had hoped that such convergence could
provide the basis for turning the RWP away from narrow
preoccupation with the popular-front parliamentary
milieu in Ceylon — a miUeu which is itself in disrepair in the
aftermath of electoral rout — and toward the opportunities
indicated by the growth of the Janatha Vimukthi
Peramuna (JVP) — People's Liberation Front — (whose
1971 radical youth uprising was drowned in blood by the
popular-front government) and the unrest among Sri
Lanka's nationally oppressed Tamil population. But the
RWP delegation chose to break from the conference rather
than break its nostalgic links to the stinking corpse of the
reformist Lanka Samasamaja Party (LSSP).

In typically centrist fashion. Comrade Samarakkody
as the main spokesman for the RWP delegation sought
to duck politics, hiding behind the filibuster as his main
technique. In a studied effort to avoid the real issues, he
turned everything into a question of prestige and
imagined insult. In his conduct toward the conference he
showed himself to stand in the tradition of Andr6s Nin,
Hugo Urbahns, Henk Sneevliet and Guillermo Lora—
"national communist" veteran leaders who could be pretty
orthodox under sealed-off conditions, only to reveal their
orthodoxy as essentially hollow in the face of historic
questions expressed concretely. Though we are not given to
comparing ourselves to Trotsky, in this case a look at the
correspondence between Trotsky and Andres Nin shows an
even uncanny similarity to the exchanges between the iSt
conference delegates and Samarakkody, with the former
insisting on sharp political characterization while the latter
protested about "tone" in a real or spurious display of hurt
pride.

This exposure did not come cheap. The iSt had been
loosely associated with Edmund Samarakkody for a
number of years. In 1971 he first wrote us that "speaking
for myself, I am generally in agreement with your

WINTER 1979-80

19

orientation on some matters of importance to the
Trotskyist movement." Further correspondence resulted in
a literary collaboration to publicize the USec's suppression
of the reports of a special commission (convened at
Samarakkody's insistence at the USec's April 1969
Congress) on Bala Tampoe, whose position as head of the
USec's Ceylon section is merely the "socialist" cover for his
activities as top bureaucrat of a large white-collar trade
union (see "The Case of Bala Tampoe," Spartacist No. 21,
Fall 1972). The collaboration continued with Spartacist's
publication of Samarakkody's "The Struggle for Trotsky-
ism in Ceylon" (Spartacist No. 22, Winter 1973-74) and
later with occasional articles for Workers Vanguard.

But our main interest was in exploring the evident
programmatic differences between our tendency and the
Samarakkody group with the aim of determining whether a
sufficient programmatic basis existed for an eventual
fusion between our organizations. We knew this would not
be an easy determination to make. We understood that the
RWP presented itself to us always in its most leftist light
and that its repeated ignoring of our requests for RWP
published and internal materials (e.g., minutes) -^was no
accident. It was only through painfully expensive visits to
Sri Lanka — perhaps half a dozen in as many years — that
any real sense was gained of the perspectives and work of
the RWP.

Most of the early discussions centered on the national
question and the Samarakkody group's sharp opposition
to our line of revolutionary defeatism on both sides in the
Arab-Israeli war of 1967. The RWP's evident softness
toward "progressive" nationalist formations in backward
countries placed a big question mark over its ability to pose
a class-against-class line in Ceylon, where popular-frontist

blocs with the "left"-bourgeois formations against the
"pro-imperialist" bourgeois party have besmirched the
name of ostensible Trotskyism.

That the RWP had made more than a formal effort to
repudiate popular frontism was clear from the courageous
action of Samarakkody and another leader of his group,
Meryl Fernando, who had on 3 December 1964, as LSSP
Members of Parliament, participated in a vote of no-
confidence in the government, over the objections of the
class collaborators and their left tails who blamed Edmund
and Meryl for the fall of "their" government. In the sequel,
the comrades proved unable to defend their principled
action against the popular-front apologists who of course
charged them with "aiding the right." The incident and its
aftermath are described in the box on this page.

In 1974, after a protracted visa fight, the iSt succeeded in
bringing two RWP comrades to North America and
Europe for formal discussions. The results led to a
distancing. The hard line drawn in the debates on the
national question was compounded by a pervasive
skepticism emanating from the RWP over the Spartacist
League's self-description as a "propaganda group" — a
skepticism we interpreted as an accusation of sectarianism,
diplomatically worded (and this from a "party" of a dozen
members!). It was in the course of these discussions that we
first became aware that the RWP had, eight years after the
fact, disavowed the 1964 vote and had actually used the
analogy of the 1931 "Red Referendum" in Prussia where
the Stalinists had made a bloc with the Nazis to bring down
the Social Democratic government. Not only is the rightist
United National Party not a fascist party, but the Sri Lanka
Freedom Party — unlike the social democracy — is not a
continued on next page

1964: Samarakkody vs. the Popular Front

"In 1964 when the popular front came in, it came in
on a very narrow majority; a right wing of the Sri
Lanka Freedom Party broke away; and through a
series of maneuvers, the throne speech — which is the
principal address containing the intended program of
the popular front — was voted down on an amendment
by an independent rightist who had been primed by the
UNP [United National Party]. It was a very nice
amendment, by the way. It said: we condemn this
incoming government which has failed to protect the
living standards of the working masses. The two
comrades of the parliamentary fraction of the
LSSP(R) [Lanka Samasamaja Party (Revolution-
ary)], namely Edmund [Samarakkody] and Meryl
[Fernando] [both later of the RWP], voted for the
amendment. But, lo and behold, everybody else in the
room suddenly voted for the amendment and the
government didn't fall, but it got a vote of no
confidence, and it chose to turn that into a new
election. And immediately the old LSSP turned to
Edmund and Meryl and said: you turned the country
over to fascist, imperialist, CIA capitalism and what
are they paying you for it? . . . And they felt this keenly, •
because while they had conducted themselves in a

principled way, they were still very much in the milieu
of the LSSP.

"But they were stuck, they'd made this vote and they
defended it for nearly ten years; but then they wanted
to back away and said it was a tactical mistake. At
exactly the time that the youth were being murdered by
the popular front, the Tamils were hating the popular
front, all those forces that wanted a change in society
despised the popular front . . . our comrades could look
only at the LSSP....

"So in adversity, our comrades were very principled
and strong and forthright, but given a little opportuni-
ty, because there was a split in the LSSP, they said: oh,
it was a tactical mistake

"If the comrades in Ceylon can be made to see the
contradiction between what they did and their
positions — remember, they did it; it's not something
we are trying to shove down their throats that they
should have done — that tends to unwind all of their
tailing after the popular fronts."

— Report of the iSt Delegation to Sri Lanka
to the New York local of the SL/U.S.,
8 July 1979

20

SPARTACIST

Popular Frontism vs. the Tamil People

"... To what extent has that section of the Ceylonese
Trotskyist movement . . . which opposed the drift to the
1964 [LSSP] betrayal, split over it, and then unlike all
the other splitters actually sought to transcend the
'old', 'good' LSSP, actually done so? That the RWP
has done so to a degree is clear but this is a qualitative
matter and dependent upon both clear formal program
and living practice

"...It would seem that the question of the Tamil
minority in Ceylon is of triple importance. First the
immigrant-descended Tamil laborers on the planta-
tions producing for the world market are the primary
creators of value and are by that fact alone central to a
proletarian revolutionary perspective. . . . Second, the
struggle by the Leninist vanguard against Sinhalese
chauvinism among the laboring masses | of the
dominant ethnic majority can be no less a precondition
for successful revolution than the struggle against
Great Russian chauvinism was for the Bolsheviks.
Third, for the sake of the extension of the revolution,
the laboring population of at least South India may
well take the treatment of the Indian-derived Tamils as
the key test as to the genuineness of Ceylonese
revolutionary intentions.

"But after the 1950 LSSP reunification we have seen

virtually no recognition of these considerations

Instead we note as the alternative consummated by the
LSSP the succession of: a national horizon, a
parliamentary focus, conciliation to 'anti-imperialist'
Sinhalese communalist chauvinism, class collabora-

part of the workers movement, but simply a left-talking
nationalist/chauvinist bourgeois formation. Although one
can discuss whether a smarter tactic might have been found
than a vote over a pro-working-class motion hypocritically
proposed by a rightist, the RWP's discomfort with its
principled stance of 1964 placed a major question mark
over the Ceylonese comrades' ability to withstand the
pervasive pressures of popular frOntism and suggested an
affirmative answer to the question: Is it ever proper to
register a vote of confidence in a bourgeois popular-front
government?

The RWP's reversal of its "correct verdict" of 1964 is
even more egregious in the light of the wholesale massacre
of Ceylonese youth carried out by the popular-front
government in response to the 1971 JVP-led uprising. Mrs.
Bandaranaike's mass butchery exposed before the Ceylo-
nese masses what revolutionists should have known in their
guts: that a popular front is not a half-step toward
socialism, but a capitalist regime deserving of no support.
The iSt has stood alone in the world movement in refusing
to vote for the parties — including the working-class
parties — of popular fronts. The RWP's later rejection of
this position, and of the principled stand of 1 964, seemed to
put period to any possibility of fundamental rapproche-
ment between the RWP and the iSt.

Though the 1974 discussions ended in an impasse, we
continued a fraternal relationship with the RWP, including
an (extremely one-sided) "exchange" of publications and

tion, overt betrayal, complicity in counterrevolution-
ary butchery. For revolutionists, a principled class-
struggle domestic line would be an intolerable
contradiction in the absence of an energetically
pursued internationalist policy reflected internally in
the question of the Tamil plantation proletariat and
the struggle against Sinhalese chauvinism, necessarily
the prime cause of communalism

"...To have approached the Sri Lanka Freedom
Party in November 195 1 for a no-contest agreement on
the grounds of that party's verbal radicalism was, from
the standpoint of the permanent revolution and the
concrete perspective of proletarian revolution on the
island, already a crime. The key agitation of the SLFP
was, of course, 'Sinhala Only'. From the standpoint of
the Tamil plantation workers it is impossible to seethe
SLFP as the kind of 'lesser evil' with which revolution-
ists would sign no-contest agreements. . . .

"Something should be said about the April 1971
uprising of Sinhalese youth organized by the JVP. . . .
That such an uprising, evidently conspiratorially
prepared over a period of time, could come as an
abrupt surprise to all sections of established Ceylonese
political life would appear as an indictment of both the
socially remote and artificial character of the parlia-
mentary milieu and the fixation of all previously
established political elements upon it."

—Letter to Samarakkody, 27 October 1973,
reprinted in [iSt] International Discussion
Bulletin No. 3, May 1974

selected internal materials and the publication of an
International Discussion Bulletin (No. 7, March 1977)
containing two lengthy documents b^' the iSt and a reply by
Comrade Samarakkody.

So we were perplexed when we received a letter datied 10
April 1979 informing us that the February 10 RWP
conference, after "a lengthy discussion," had decided to
"seek to join" the iSt — all the more so as we had not been
asked to submit so much as greetings to the conference nor
even informed that the question of fusion was being
considered. On April 28 we wrote the RWP that:

"As with all sections and candidates for fusion we would
need to have a mutual sense of assurance— in a program-
matically definable way — that the Ceylonese comrades
seek proletarian revolution in Ceylon and in South Asia. If
these two considerations exist— the determination to act in
concert internationally and the programmatically ex-
pressed appetite to seek proletarian revolution — then
there is a basis for a valid fusion."
We proposed that an authoritative iSt delegation should
visit Ceylon for discussions.

In late spring, a delegation of four iSt comrades from
North America and one from South Asia went to Sri
Lanka. The delegation and the RWP leadership agreed to a
Unification Agreement (20 June) which noted that because
of "both the extent of the poHtical differences, the extreme
geographical distances, and cultural and standard of living
divergences involved, never has a more difficult unification
been attempted involving the iSt and another organiza-

WINTER 1979-80

21

tion." Despite RWP amendments to water down the key
formulations, the final draft still noted the political
obstacles to a valid unification:

"Politically and as an extreme characterisation the RWP
could see elements of sectarian ultra-leftism in the iSt,
centering upon at best indifference to national struggles of
the oppressed, and willful ineffectuality in approaching the
masses and in party building. The iSt for its part could
perceive, as an extreme characterisation, the RWP as
partaking at least in part of a centrism which tails petty-
bourgeois nationalism and gives critical support to the
worst aspects of revisionism and reformism, while in its
own propaganda is largely unable to transcend mere
democratic demands."

On the basis of this document, a perspective of unification
was adopted. In its report to the New York local on July 10,
the iSt delegation explained:

"If these comrades were kids, we wouldn't touch them with
a ten foot pole. But they are absolutely the very most
evolved, principled best of old Ceylonese Trotskyism —
which was terrible "

In the expectation of unification, we arranged to bring a
three-man RWP delegation to the iSt international
conference. We reiterated our requests for minutes and
other RWP materials. Two iSt comrades undertook a
crash course in Sinhala. The conference agenda was
prepared with the RWP unification proposal expected to
be its central point.

The National Question Comes Home

However the political conduct of the RWP delegation to
the iSt conference was characterized by out-and-out refusal
to seek the mutual political interpenetration which all
claimed to agree was key to a valid international
unification. The Ceylonese delegates held themselves aloof
from most of the deliberations and — in the few instances
where they actively participated in the proceedings — made
no attempt to struggle for a common international line.
Instead of seeking to win the iSt membership to their
criticisms of the iSt majority line, they shamelessly evaded
the issues, seeking to turn the iSt's sharp political
characterizations of their positions into irpagined slights on
their personal integrity.

This was their "method" in the panel discussion on
popular frontism. The two iSt reporters sought to place the
question in an international historical context, pointing to
the Bolsheviks' policy in February-October 1917 as the
definitive example. Precedents were also noted from both
the Second and Third Internationals; the experience of the
European Trotsky ists in the 1930s was analyzed and

lessons drawn from the case of Ceylon (transcripts of these
presentations are printed elsewhere in this issue).

Yet Comrade Samarakkody, the reporter for the RWP,
restricted his remarks solely to the question of Ceylon,
ignoring in an absurdly parochial manner the historical
material presented as well as the numerous recent instances

Spartacist

Edmund Samarakkody speaking at panel discus-
sion on popular frontism.

where popular frontism has been a key test of the
Trotskyist program (Chile, France, Portugal, etc.). And in
his defense of the RWP's hne on Ceylon, Comrade
Samarakkody ducked politics by pretending to understand
hard political characterization — that the RWP in the last
analysis sees itself as part of a parliamentarist popular-
front "left" continuum — only as personal insult. Thus:
"how can anyone say about Edmund such things," "have
we not always said we were against the popular front?"

The RWP delegates devoted most of their speaking time
to professing shock at an iSt reporter's statement that
during the RWP/iSt discussions in Ceylon in July, RWP
leaders had admitted that it was pressure from a 1972 left
split from the LSSP which caused the RWP to publicly
disavow its 1964 vote eight years after the fact. Oh
continued on next page

Leninist Faction Bulletin

From Centrism to Trotskyism

Documents of the expelled
Leninist Faction of the WSL

price: 75p

Order from: Leninist Faction, BIVI Box 380, London WC1V 6XX, England

22

SPARTACIST

,ILTHE KILLER KL^N
(THE CHARGES MS

-Mi-KLAN rmi
mnaua nol

SMASH KLAN

Black autoworkers participating in SL/U.S.
1979.

Workers Vanguard

organized Rally Against Klan Terror held in Detroit, November

comrades, said the RWP, this is terrible, slanderous;
nothing like that was ever said. On the face of it, then, it
would seenixvery strange that the RWP did not object
earlier. When the iSt delegation returned from Ceylon, a
report was made before the New York local of the SL/U.S.
on 8 July. A transcript prepared for the information of our
membership and sent as well to the RWP contained the
statement: "In adversity, our comrades were very princi-
pled and strong and forthright, but given a Httle
opportunity, because there was a split in the LSSP, they
said: oh, it was a tactical mistake. . . ."

But not so strange. Apparently the popular frontism
panel really brought home to the RWP leaders what was
told them from the beginning: the international democratic
centralism of the iSt does not permit diplomatic political
passivity toward the public line and work of any section, a
Ceylon section included. So Comrade Samarakkody's next
act was to indulge in a shameful provocation. Having
participated at our invitation in a Control Commission
convoked at the request of the Australian comrades to
investigate serious disciplinary charges against a former
leading member of the section. Comrade Samarakkody
professed himself unable to draw any conclusions from the
evidence while disingenuously denying any intention of
impugning the veracity of the numerous witnesses and
depositions. This ugly conduct only revealed the RWP's
fear of making a clear political break from the conference.

By this point the delegates had recognized that fusion
was not possible at this conference. But as serious
Marxists, far from wanting to break off the debates, we
sought to use the opportunity obtained at enormous effort
and expense to exchange opinions. However, before the
main agenda point on Ceylon began, the RWP delegation
simply informed us that "the atmosphere was not

propitious for fusion," packed its bags and left. Thus the
RWP threw away an opportunity to argue for its brand of
"Trotskyism" before hundreds of Trotskyists — an oppor-
tunity to call on the ranks of the iSt to oust their "sectarian"
leadership, for example — showing thereby that its leaders
were guided by the narrowest preoccupation with maneu-
vers. After long years of honorable if partial struggle
against the revisionism which has destroyed the reputation
of ostensible Trotskyism in Ceylon, the founding leaders of
the RWP have shown that they are used up. -
Despite the cowardly walkout of the RWP, the
conference discussion on Ceylon was clarifying. The RWP
"came here perhaps not knowing that they had to choose
between the LSSP and the iSt," said a delegate from the
French section. "They found out. And they chose," she
said. Another delegate reported on an informal discussion
between two iSt women and members of the RWP
delegation, where the latter showed that the oft-repeated
RWP self-criticisms over its lack of Tamil, and female
members had been merely sops to the iSt bearing no
relationship to the RWP's real political choices:

"Women attend their study classes, but the woman
question has not been raised there. They do not see the
need for special work to draw womep into union activity
(35 percent of [one of the RWP representative's union are
women). They asserted that since it took 4-5 times as much
work to recruit a woman than a man, it would be a priority
to recruit four or five men. . .women would come around
in a period of class upsurge."

Another delegate rose to rhetorically inquire:

"What would it mean if we applied this method to U.S.
blacks, who are five times as hard to recruit and five times
as much trouble inside when you do recruit them? Perhaps
we should direct all our efforts at white Americans and just
expect blacks to rally around us in a revolutionary
upsurge?"

WINTER 1979-80

23

It was also pointed out that the RWP pamphlet on the
Tamil question ("Tamil Minority Question and the
Revolutionary Workers Party") is purely civil libertarian
and does not transcend democratic demands.

Comrades who had been studying Sinhala in
anticipation of a fusion played an active role in the
discussion. One reported on a three-part RWP article on
Iran ("The People's Revolutionary Uprising in Iran,"
Panthi Patana, 15 January, 1 February and 15 February
1979) which gave the lie to the RWP's repeated claims it
agreed with the iSt position of no support to the pro-
Khomeini mobilizations. Another gave a graphic illustra-
tion of the RWP's fixation on parliamentarism: "The RWP
has 12 full and 6 candidate members. So they ran for
parliament — 18 candidates!"

But the RWP, having beaten its cowardly retreat, was
not there to respond. And in the months since the
conference we have not heard a substantive political word
from the RWP leadership, much less an evaluation of the
conference and justification of their break from it.

The Struggle for the Continuity of Revolutionary
Trotskyism

When the RWP delegates beat their cowardly retreat
from the iSt conference, they showed that their professed
internationalism was only skin deep. They had sought, not
a genuine interpenetration, but an alliance for ceremonial
purposes which leaves all partners free to pursue their
national aspirations without interference from a living
international collective. Ceylon is a small island where
everybody has international ties; even a trade-union ultra-
reformist hke Bala Tampoe finds it worthwhile to be
associated with the USec. It would appear that the
Samarakkody group has even sought to exaggerate its
connecfion to the iSt. Thus Ceylon's leading English-
language journal of radical opinion, the Lanka Guardian,
reflected the conventional belief when it referred to "Mr.
Edmund Samarakkody's group which is affiliated to the
Spartacist League faction of the world Trotskyite move-

ment" (1 November 1978). But the iSt has no desire for
"sections" whose national practice would make a mockery
of our international democratic centralism. The RWP will
have to look elsewhere for partners in that kind of
enterprise.

The RWP is the organic left wing of the old LSSP. The
LSSP today is rightly despised by the Ceylonese masses as
part and parcel of Mrs. Bandaranaike's coalition govern-
ment which ground the economy down to penury while
slaughtering thousands of radicalized youth. But for the
RWP, the rout of the popular front at the polls is seen as the
end of left politics in Ceylon. If there's nothing leftish going
on in parliament, therefore there's nothing going on,
though the JVP can pull 50,000 people to a Colombo May
Day march. It is tragic that on an island where ostensible
Trotskyism has historically had a mass following, the
young neo-Stalinists of the JVP now appear as the symbols
of militant opposition to the popular front.

The Samarakkody group is the concretization of the
observation that no national revolutionary current can
pursue an authentic revolutionary course in protracted
isolation from the struggle to build a world party. From the
time of our inception as a tendency, the American nucleus
of the iSt struggle^ to break out of enforced national
isolation. Through this lengthy process we came to see that
the main international currents of ostensible Trotskyism
were fundamentally programmatically moribund. Thus we
adopted the perspective of fighting for the "rebirth" of the
Fourth International rather than its reshuffling
("reconstruction").

Yet we were aware that there existed local groupings
which had not been firmly bound to the liquidationist
program of Pabloism, and we tried to engage them. We
looked the longest at the Organisation Communiste
Internationaliste, a purported continuator of the 1951-53
struggle for orthodox Trotskyism, because it was the largest
repository of cadre dating back to the Trotskyist
movement of Trotsky's time, in the hope that some section
of that cadre would break on essentials from that
continued on next page

Militants of the
Trotzklstische Liga
Deutschlands
marching in Frankfurt

24

SPARTACIST

organization's rightward course. But there was no crack in
the OCI cadre when the organization's StaUnophobic
apologetics for CIA-backed social democracy in Portugal
revealed the OCI as having — like the American SWP —
qualitatively degenerated from anti-Pabloist orthodoxy to
reformist appetite.

Our long fraternal experience with the Ceylonese
comrades of the Samarakkody group was our most notable
effort to find, in the words of James P. Cannon, "the
initiating cadres of the new organization in the old." This
grouping's last decisive revolutionary act took place in
1964, just at the time of the founding of the organizational-
ly independent Spartacist tendency in the U.S. Had we
been capable of forcefully intersecting the Ceylonese
comrades at that time, it is conceivable that they might
have been won to authentic Trotskyism. But the 40 or so
Americans who made up our tendency at that time would
have had little authority in the eyes of former leaders of a
mass-based party.

Since the emergence from the American SWP of that
fragment of Trotskyist continuity which founded our
tendency, the iSt has won from ostensibly Trotskyist
organizations many youthful militants, but not the veteran
fighters whose experience could have helped shape the new
generation of revolutionists. We do not regret, therefore,
that we undertook to go through this experience of political
clarification with the RWP. If it had gone favorably, it
would have had incalculable political value for the
reconstitution of an authentic revolutionary
international — and in any case it could not have been left
unresolved.

We Go Forward

The first plenum of the International Executive
Committee elected at the conference centered on discussion

of how to exploit the iSt's unique Trotskyist position of
"Down with the Shah! Down with the Mullahs!", to
forcefully confront the fake-lefts who made themselves
complicit in the Persian-chauvinist Khomeini theocracy's
assaults on the national minorities, oil workers, landless
peasants and women of Iran.

Additionally, as we pointed out in the conference
document:

"Carter's 'human rights' campaign, reviving the rhetoric of
the Cold War in order to morally re-arm U.S. imperialism
after Vietnam and Watergate, has conditioned a rapid shift
to the right on the part of the ostensible Trotskyist
movement

"The USec majority has most recently embraced the anti-
Soviet parliamentary cretinism of the Eurocommunists

The OCI has now become essentially reformist. Thus the
USec majority's abandonment of even formal obeisance to
the Trotskyist position on the Russian question leaves to
the iSt alone the heritage of Soviet defensism."

Carter's intimations of World War III over
Afghanistan — which demand an unequivocal military
defense of the Soviet Union against U.S. imperialism —
fully and dramatically vindicate this statement. The
pseudo-Trotskyists lurch from one line to another
mumbling that somehow the Afghan mullahs are less
"progressive" than their brothers across the Iranian border.
Our forthright slogans "Hail Red Army!", "Extend Social
Gains of October Revolution to Afghan Peoples!" sharply
raise our political profile as the Trotskyist alternative to
centrist confusionism or outright support to imperiaHst
anti-Sovietism.

But these developments — combined with regroupment
opportunities presented by the unanticipated factional
realignments of the USec split — severely tax the capacities
of especially our European propaganda groups. Nor are
the objective possibilities for iSt regroupments limited to
polarizations within the various warring wings of ostensi-
ble Trotskyism. In Germany and England particularly, any

te ■

WorKers Vanguard

New York, February 1980: Spartacus Youth League answers Carter's war drive head on, not pacifism but
Soviet defensism.

WINTER 1979-80

25

notion of "left Maoism" has become completely untenable
as the Chinese bureaucracy rushes to outdo the Christian
Democrats and Tories in anti-Soviet bellicosity. Now more
than ever we must seek to intervene in the "crisis of
Maoism." Even some of the reformist pro-Moscow
Communist parties have taken on a more militant anti-
NATO posture which could augur greater receptivity at the
base to the Trotskyist program of defense of the gains of
October through political revolution against the Stalinist
bureaucratic castes and socialist revolution against
capitalism. If our overburdened propaganda groups allow
this panoply of opportunities to pass us by, history will not
be kindly in its verdict.

In this context, our European sections have neither the
forces nor the mass links to maintain more than an external
and episodic presence in key class battles, such as the
present British steel strike which strains to break out of the
control of the Labourite union tops. Paradoxically the
American SL/U.S., which struggled for a decade to break
out of deforming national isolation, is now, in its capacity
for selective agitation, a balance to the European sections
whose overwhelming task must remain communist
propaganda and regroupment struggles. The modest trade-
union implantation of the SL/U.S. and its deepening
experience among black working people (an oppressed
color-caste and in a sense America's closest approximation
to an internal colony) are a slender but crucial cord
grounding the European sections in living struggles.

But Europe and America are not the world. The iSt's
concentration in industrialized nations is an evident
weakness which must be transcended before the Interna-
tional Trotskyist League, programmatic nucleus of a
reborn Fourth International, can emerge. An effort to
cohere a communist nucleus from among Iranian leftists
shaken by the bloody consequences of tailing Shi'ite
clerical reaction must proceed through the patient labor of
circulating Persian-language Spartacist materials among
Emigres and foreign students. We must carry our fight
against the left-centrism of the Samarakkody group into
Sri Lanka itself. The rebirth of the Fourth International
requires a struggle to root a communist presence in Japan
and South Asia, the Near East, Latin America, South
Africa and the degenerated and deformed workers states.

Our forces are small in proportion to our aim, which is to
consummate proletarian revolution pervasively on this
planet. Yet it is only the authentic revolutionary program
of the iSt which can politically arm the proletariat for the
conquest of state power on a world scale. No wing of the
USec or ex-USec even approximates a Trotskyist perspec-
tive; indeed, the program of the centrist "London Bureau"
of the 1930s looks good by comparison. In the aftermath of
split, centrists remaining within the USec camp will find
themselves wedded ever more closely to the reformist
American SWP, while leftist elements who followed
Moreno because his bonapartist maneuverism availed
itself of a leftist pretext in splitting over Nicaragua must
now clearly see the true nature of the Moreno/OCI bloc
displayed over support to the anti-Communist Islamic
reactionaries in Afghanistan. These new alliances are built
on sand; they are cynical and profoundly anti-
internationalist. Only the iSt's Leninist struggle for
principled international unity based on program can unite
the workers of the world in the fight for international
revolution. ■

The Test of Time

U.S. imperialism's declaration of "Cold War 11" over
Afghanistan is dramatic confirmation that the iSt has
alone upheld the revolutionary heritage of Leninism. This
new conjuncture is a brutal shock to the fake-lefts who
tailed Carter's "human rights" rhetoric, ignoring its anti-
Soviet cutting edge; who ignored or apologized for
China's sinister alliance with American imperialism
against the USSR: who, in short, thought they could
ignore the centrality of the "Russian question"— in
particular the obligation of proletarian internationalists
to militantly oppose imperialism's implacable revanchist
appetite to reverse the gains of October. Equally it
exposes as cynics and frauds the "Marxists" who fed the
flames of anti-Communist Islamic reaction with their
paeans to Khomeini's theocratic "mass movement."
While the opportunists and impressionists rush to cover
their tracks, the iSt stands on its record, which has stood
the test of time.

1969

"At the present time, the Vietnam war and the extreme
diplomatic and internal difficulties of the Chinese state
have forced the Maoists to maintain greater hostility to
imperialism and verbally disclaim the USSR's avowed
policy of 'peaceful coexistence' while themselves peaceful-
ly coexisting with Japan. However, we must warn against
the growing objective possibility — given the tremendous
industrial and military capacity of the Soviet Union — of a
U.S. deal with China." [original emphasis]

— "Development and Tactics of the Spartacist

League [U.S.]," Marxist Bulletin No. 9,

Part II, 30 August 1969

1977

"We repeat the warning we have sounded since the
beginning of Carter's 'human rights' ploy: behind the
liberal rhetoric stands the threat of imperialist war,
principally directed against the Soviet Union."
— "The Main Enemy Is at Home,"

Workers Vanguard No. 163, 24 June 1977

1978

"But what is the political basis of the current opposition
to the shah? . . . fundamentally the current mass mobiliza-
tions against the Pahlayi family are under the ideological

sway of Muslim fundamentalists The victory of a

reactionary movement of Muslim traditionalism will
represent a far-reaching historical defeat for communists,
who seek a revolutionary emancipation from semi-feudal
backwardness. The religious opposition stands on the
heritage of the Middle Ages, opposed even to the paltry
social advances for women in the past decades." [original
emphasis]

— "Down with the Shah, Down with the

Mullahs — Iran in Turmoil," Workers Vanguard
No. 215, 22 September 1978

26

SPARTACIST

Reply to Our Critics

No "Critical Support" to
Popular Frontism

At the first delegated conference of the international
Spartacist tendency a discussion was held on the question
of revolutionary electoral policy toward workers parties
participating in popular-front coalitions. Below are edited
presentations and summaries given by Comrades Jan
Norden and James Robertson.

Presentation by Norden:

Comrades, the question of the electoral policy of
Bolsheviks toward the popular front has been presented by
the United Secretariat as simply a tactical question, and we
have become known over the last period for our position
that this is a ceritral, strategic question especially in this
period.

There's a quotation from a letter by Trotsky to the Dutch
section saying that the popular front "is the main question
for proletarian class strategy for this epoch" and "the best
criterion for the difference between Bolshevism and
Menshevism" ["The Dutch Section and the International,"
in Writings of Leon Trotsky (1935-36)]. As you'll notice,
different passages from this quote keep reappearing in our
press. I'd like to just mention tonight two other things that
are in the same key quotation. One is that Trotsky takes on
not only those who directly support the popular front but
also those who "present this question as a tactical or even as
a technical maneuver, so as to be able to peddle their wares
in the shadow of the Popular Front." And second is that he
presents as "the greatest historical example of the Popular
Front" Russia in 1917, from February to October. That's
where to look for the Bolshevik precedent on this question.

Now, we have very little time, so I would like to
concentrate on the essentials. And the main point I think
we have to make here is that giving electoral support to the
so-called "workers parties of the popular front" is, in fact,
the policy of critical support — so-called "critical
support" — to popular fronts coming from reformists and
centrists who make claim to the tradition of Trotskyism. In
other words, they want to give "critical support" to the
popular front without openly, directly and demonstrably
crossing the class line, so they give "critical support" to the
workers parties of the popular front. In effect, this policy
calls on the workers to put a bourgeois political formation
into office. It calls for votes to the mass parties of the
popular front. In many cases, as much as 95 percent of all
the votes for the popular front in fact go to the workers
parties of the popular front. This was the case in Chile in
1970, also in France in the early 1970s, and classically in
Spain where Trotsky was constantly referring to the
bourgeois component of the People's Front as the "shadow
of the bourgeoisie." And, as Trotsky said about the
popular-frontist policy of the POUM, "There can be no

greater crime than coalition with the bourgeoisie in a
period of socialist revolution" ["No Greater Crime," in The
Spanish Revolution (1931-39)].

Now, in order to justify this policy, opportunists
frequently use many sophisticated arguments essentially to
deny that the popular front is, in fact, a bourgeois political
formation. The Mandelites denied that the French Union
of the Left, or the Chilean Unidad Popular government
headed by Allende, was a popular front in order to carry
out their policy of voting for the workers parties of the
popular front. Another argument used is that a popular
front is essentially the same as a social-democratic labor
party in power, especially in an imperialist country. By
glossing over the capitalist class character of the popular
front they, in effect, tell the workers: "Look, these people
are part of our class and you can demand of them anything.
They, of course, are betrayers and will attempt to deny the
just demands of the workers, but it is historically possible
for them to go beyond the limits of capitalism to crush
fascism and stop imperialist war and so on." Now this is the
argument that is used. But in fact the popular front,
because it is a bourgeois formation, because its program
must necessarily be that of the most so-called "moderate'^'
elements who are the bourgeois components of the popular
front, cannot go beyond the bounds of capitalism. And by
helping to place the popular front in power, those who give
electoral support to its candidates share responsibility for
setting up a roadblock to revolution and fostering the
victory of reaction. So for us it is a central question and not
simply a tactical maneuver of a secondary order.

This has been a constant difference between us and the
United Secretariat and various centrists over the past years.
But it has become particularly important again in light of
the prospect of a unification between the international
Spartacist tendency and the Revolutionary Workers Party
of Sri Lanka. In this projected unification certainly the
clearest outstanding and currently expressed^ area of
difference is precisely over whether it is principled and
correct to give electoral support to any party of the popular
front, which is as we see this question. Comrade Robertson
wrote in his letter to Comrade Samarakkody expressing
the central importance of raising class criteria and not
simply "progressive vs. reactionary" criteria. And in the
supplementary letter by myself and Comrade Sharpe we
stressed the central importance for Trotskyists that any
electoral tactic must express the fundamental Marxist
principle of the political independence of the proletariat.
So, 1 don't want to go back to those points, I want to make
a couple of other observations.

The first one is about Russia in 1917. Frequently, the
example of the Bolshevik slogan of "Down with the ten
capitalist ministers" is raised by those who argue for
electoral support to the bourgeois workers parties

WINTER 1979-80

27

participating in a popular front. And this is also the case
with the RWP and I think that frequently this is seen as an
argument against us because of a misunderstanding — or, as
it may be, a willful misinterpretation— rof what we mean
when we say that in a popular front the contradiction
within the bourgeois workers parties has been suppressed.
In the late 1930s then-comrade Shachtman wrote an article
on the Spanish elections in which he put our view of this
quite clearly. He said when the workers parties joined the
popular front, "politically speaking, they appeared before
the masses in one party with the bourgeoisie" ["The
Spanish Elections and the People's Front," New Militant,
14 March 1936]. And he underlined that and stressed it.
The demand of the Bolsheviks in 1917 was that //the
Mensheviks broke and the Left SRs broke from their
bourgeois allies in the Provisional Government and from
the officer corps and formed a government based on the
Soviet, then they would support them against reaction —
but only then. And that is exactly what our policy of
conditional opposition to these reformist and centrist
parties in a popular front consists of: it's saying that //you
break with the popular front, then we can consider a policy
Of critical support to your candidate, but not until.

Now, the second observation is that -this was not a
constant policy of the Bolsheviks. From July until late
August they did not raise this policy at a time when the
Mensheviks and Kerensky were placing themselves at the
spearhead of reaction and reactionary repression.' [Nor did
the Bolsheviks use this tactic after they obtained a majority
in the Petrograd Soviet, from mid-September on.]. As one
comrade said, "When the communists have a majority in
the working population or in the Soviets, we are
unconditionally opposed to electoral coalitionism with
anybody."

The third observation is this, comrades: when you go up
to the ballot box or tell workers what to do at the ballot
box, it is not simply an electoral question. A government is
going to come out of that. And a bourgeois popular-front
government at a time of working-class upsurge is a ticket
for fascism, it's a ticket for imperialist war. If you haven't
warned the workers in advance that this is what electing
that popular front is going to mean, you're complicit in
what follows. The key task of the Marxists is to prepare the
proletariat so it can resist false friends and see who its true
enemies are.

Now Russia in 1917 was not a case of bourgeois
parliamentarism, but [the question of coalitionism, of
popular frontism, was a central question nonetheless. And]
if the Bolsheviks had flinched— well, they did flinch,
actually, once they did and the second time they almost
did — but if that had been the dominant policy there would
- have been no October Revolution.^

OK, two other quick points. People frequently say that
in the 1930s the Trotskyists did not have our policies in
France. Undoubtedly this will come up in the discussion

'As Trotsky wrote, "The slogan 'Power to the Soviets' from now
on meant armed insurrection against the government and those
military cliques which stood behind it. But to raise an
insurrection in the cause of 'Power to the Soviets' when the
Soviets did not want the power, was obvious nonsense" (History
of the Russian Revolution, Vol. 2, Ch. 13, "The Bolsheviks and
the Soviets").

Kerensky and his entourage.

period. But I would like to call attention to the way Trotsky
formulated the question in 1921 in his messages to the
French party [see "On the United Front," in The First Five
Years of the Comintern, Vol. 2]. He said that //—again, he
presented it as a precondition — the Dissidents agreed to
break the Left Bloc with the bourgeoisie, then we can talk
about united front tactics with the Communist Party. But
only in that circumstance.

And then finally, on the RWP explicitly: what we find
most disturbing and potentially an opening in your own
views is the contradiction between your policy or your
stated policy of wanting to give electoral support to the
workers parties of the popular front on the one hand, and
on the other hand taking the necessary step for any
Bolshevik of voting against the bourgeois popular-front
government. Now there may be questions of tactics but the
vote to bring down the Bandaranaike coalition government
[of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party and the ex-Trotskyist
Lanka Samasamaja Party] in 1964 was obligatory
for any true Bolshevik or Trotskyist. And we find that
courageous act one which we stand on, which we have
claimed as our own in some of the documents preparing for
continued on next page

^Before Lenin returned to Russia in April, Pravda under the
direction of Kamenev and Stalin adopted a policy of conditional
support to the Lvov coalition government (the notorious support
"insofar as. . ."). Lenin had to wage a sharp struggle against that
policy, which he regarded as a principled difference. And in
October, Zinoviev and Kamenev opposed taking power without
a coalition with the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, who
however were tied to a "popular front" with Kerensky, Kornilov
and the Cadets. Again Lenin threatened split. Far from giving
any political support, however critical, to the coalition, Lenin's
strategy from April until the October insurrection was precisely
to struggle for the overthrow of the popular front by the Soviets.

28

SPARTACIST

this conference. We find that act in contradiction to your
present stated views, or the ones in your last letter on the
subject.

Presentation by Robertson:

In 1966, on behalf of the Spartacist League of the
United States, I sought to make a statement to an inter-
national conference [the London Conference of Healy's
International Committee], a statement comparable in
unpopularity to that which Comrade Edmund just made,
(laughter) We trust that the sequel will be qualitatively
different, (laughter) Now would be an appropriate time to
reveal the secret codicil to the articles of agreement that
were worked out in Sri Lanka a couple of months ago. We
agreed to turn over to the RWP the names of our
opportunists if they gave us the names of their sectarians,
(laughter)

Now, my remarks are subsumed generally under the title,
as I put it down, of "Electoral Coalitionism and the
Communists." I first want to touch on a point that needs to
be hammered out in the incoming International Executive
Committee, but I'd certainly like to sketch a view in a
sentence or two. As is perfectly clear to everyone who heard
Comrade Samarakkody, in every subjective sense [he
expressed] intense hostility and opposition to the popular-
front governments in Sri Lanka. The point at issue really
revolves around the relationship of the LSSP-R, now the
RWP, and the LSSP. It was expressly put that the reason
that the RWP, in about 1972, came to regret their vote that
assisted in bringing down the popular-front government
was because they wanted at that time to make a renewed
overture to the LSSP.

Now, in a certain sense, the experience of popular
frontism was chemically pure in Sri Lanka in a way that it
has not been in Chile, Spain or France. Because the
popular front in Sri Lanka had a chance to run on and on
and on and dissipate itself with its own momentum without
being displaced by counterrevolutionary generals or
internal or foreign fascists. The Sri Lanka Freedom Party
is, at least for the present, discredited, but the Communist
Party is badly damaged, and the LSSP is a corpse — it is
dead! Its trade-union base is disintegrated, it has lost its
youth, its women, the Tamils hate it as a chauvinist party of
a master nation. And the LSSP-R, now the RWP, tied
themselves to the LSSP — which is a corpse — and they are
seen as a left-wing split from the LSSP but still within its
orbit— part of the old boys of the LSSP— the best of a bad
lot. Where have the subjectively revolutionary elements of
Sri Lanka gone? I have to report that in Ceylon where the
Trotskyists used to be preponderant over the Stalinists, the
Stalinists have for the present won. The Mao-influenced
youth of the Stalinist parties broke away and were the
founding cadres of the JVP [Janatha Vimukthi
Peramuna — People's Liberation Front]. Now, we know
that the JVP are just popular frontists with a gun, very
much like the MIRistas in Chile. But they happen to
include something like 20,000 of the youth and the young
women that are Ceylonese militants, subjectively more or
less revolutionary. There are no youth, women or Tamils
hanging about the stench of death of the LSSP. The JVP
has the reputation in Sri Lanka of intransigent opposition

to the popular front. They have 20,000 members, the RWP
has 20 members, and no women or Tamils. This is a
question to be pursued in the International Executive.

There is nothing special, inventive or unusually
Marxistically creative about the position advanced by the
iSt. We're simply trying to apply the developed Bolshevik
experience, especially as expressed in the period from
February to October 1917, in the modern movement. And
not even as late as 1917; basically it goes back to
Luxemburg's writings on coalitionism in the Second
International at the turn of the century. To be sure, the
American Socialist Workers Party likes to point out that
coalitionism is not popular frontism, unless the Stalinists
are present in the coalition. Around about 1905 you'll find
a very partial position by Lenin, when the Bolsheviks were
still struggling for a united workers party in Russia. The
later, anti-comrade Shachtman was fond of quoting one of
these positions: "Oh, where the Bolsheviks are in the
majority we will oppose the Cadet Party. Where the
Mensheviks are in the majority the Bolsheviks will loyally
support the Cadet members of the Duma."^ This, along
with the organizational question and others, indicates that
the evolution of the Bolshevik faction of revolutionary
social democrats into the Bolshevik Party of communists
was a process over a decade.

And as my last sentence, let me frighten you with a
thought I just had. If, in fact, we did not have this position
that we do on opposition to popular fronts and any
electoral support to any wing of a popular front, I think
that we would belong in the left wing of the Mandelite USec
majority [of their 2 1/2 International]. But we're serious
people and intend to carry out the logic of our position.

Summary by Norden:

The comrades of the RWP or more precisely Comrade
Samarakkody in his letters to the Spartacist League that we
printed in our internal bulletin said that a popular front is a
two-class government. There are no two-class govern-
ments. As Trotsky said, "A horseman is not a bloc between
a horse and a man." One class commands, and in the
popular front that's the bourgeoisie. Secondly, for those

Mn 1957 Shachtman was preparing to liquidate his Independent
Socialist League into the American social democracy. To
rationalize joining a party that supported the Democrats he
pointed out that in 1906 Lenin favored maintaining unity with
the Mensheviks, even though the Mensheviks wanted to bloc
with the bourgeois Cadets in the elections to the Second State
Duma. In the article quoted by Shachtman, "Party Discipline
and the Fight Against the Pro-Cadet Social-Democrats"
{Collected Works, Vol. 1 1), Lenin stated that "The sanction of
blocs with the Cadets is the finishing touch that definitely marks
the Mensheviks as the opportunist wing of the workers' party."
Lenin called for "the widest and most relentless ideological
struggle" against "these shameful tactics of blocs with the
Cadets." However, added Lenin, if the Menshevik position
should become the party line, "o// of us, as members of the Party,
must act as one man. A Bolshevik in Odessa must cast into the
ballot box a ballot paper bearing a Cadet's name even if it sickens
him. And a Menshevik in Moscow must cast into the ballot box a
ballot paper bearing only the names of Social-Democrats, even if
his soul is yearning for the Cadets."

WINTER 1979-80

29

who are sincere opponents of popular frontism, electoral
support to the workers parties of popular fronts is not a
tactic. It is tailism masquerading as a tactic.

Trotsky had a nice phrase about tactics. He said, "It's not
enough to possess the sword. One must give it an edge. It's
not enough to give the sword an edge. One must know how
to wield it" ["On the United Front"]. The tactic must
exploit the contradiction. So the centrists say to the
workers parties of the popular front: "Break with the
bourgeoisie! Break with the harbingers of fascism and
imperialist war! If you do, we will support you — and if you
don't we'll support you anyway!" That's not a tactic! We're
for tactics.

A comrade mentioned that in the 1936 French
parliamentary elections [one of the two French groups
which claimed allegiance to the movement for the Fourth
International] maintained a Trotskyist candidate in a
district where the CP or SP candidate stepped down in
favor of a Radical. That's a conceivable tactic. But that
does not necessarily imply critical support to the workers
parties of the popular front. In fact, in 1935 the position of
the French Trotskyists was precisely that. They called for
running candidates in those circumstances^ and they did
not give critical support to any of the parties of the popular
front. It was in the '35 municipal elections.*

We look for ways of presenting our opposition to
popular frontism in a way that could give it a tactical
leverage. So that in a Canadian election at some time or
other, we first formulated the tactic of conditional
opposition.' We were so energetic about it that we went

*The second half of their "electoral" policy was for a workers
mobilization on voting day to disperse a scheduled reactionary
demonstration {La Verite, 10 May 1935).

*In 1974, when the social-democratic New Democratic Party was
running in a corridor coalition with the Liberals, we wrote: "The
Spartacist League urges a policy of conditional opposition to the
NDP in the current elections until such time as the NDP
repudiates its past practice of entering into a tacit coalition with

the Liberals Militants in the Canadian trade unions must take

up the fight to pass motions in their locals demanding that the
NDP repudiate its past practice of coalitionism as a condition for
labor support in the elections. Only those NDP candidates who
repudiate and promise to vote against the NDP-Liberal 'corridor
coalition' should be given labor support in the current election.
While the NDP remains dependent upon the unions for both
electoral and financial support, its practice of coalitionism
undercuts the very principle of independent j working-class
political action" (see "NDP Must Break With Liberals," Workers
Vanguard No. 47, 21 June 1974).

looking for some NDP legislator up in Thunder Bay,
Canada, to see if he was ready to vote against the coalition.

Our tactics must express our strategy. Our strategy is
opposition to popular frontism. One comrade asked a good
rhetorical question: "What do you do when there's only one
candidate of the popular front? You can't even distinguish
between the workers candidates of the popular front and
the bourgeois candidates, because they're one."^ Also, in
parliament you can't vote for the motion of the workers
parties of the popular front because there's only one
motion: the motion of the government, and it's the
government of the popular front — for or against.

That's the way it is in reality. Because what the masses
face in their everyday struggle is a popular front. It's a
bourgeois government, not a hydra.

Another common objection to our policy of proletarian
opposition to the popular front is the charge of aiding the
right. But until you're prepared to overthrow the existing
government, any kind of opposition to a popular front in
office will be open to the attack that it is aiding the right.
Think of the May Days in Barcelona.

Now I want to say something about a little historical
research I've been doing, and that is the question of the
popular front in the 1930s. The French GBL (Groupe
Bolchevik-L6niniste) had the position of supporting the
social democrats or Stalinists in those districts where it
didn't run its own candidates in the 1 936 elections . To some
extent that was taken as a precedent later, after World War
II. It's not the only precedent in the history of the
Trotskyist movement by a long shot. In 1942 the Chilean
POR (Partido Obrero Revolucionario) ran a candidate for
president against the popular front. And in 1948 the Italian
Trotskyists opposed any vote to the popular front, but they
were criticized by Pablo.

continued on next page

*That was the situation in the February 1936 elections in Spain
where the Popular Front presented a single slate, and also when
Allende ran for Chilean president in 1970 and Mitterrand for
French president in 1974. The response of the partisans of voting
for the workers parties of the popular front is to invent phony
distinctions. In the 1974 French vote, the OCl (Organisation
Communiste Internationaliste of Pierre Lambert) called for a
vote not to Mitterrand, candidate of the Union of the Left, but to
Mitterrand, first secretary of the Socialist Party, a workers
organization. However, the SP had removed him as first
secretary precisely in order to make this long-time former
bourgeois politician more acceptable as candidate of the popular
front.

SrI Lanka coalition
brought racism,
repression, austerity.
LsSP old guard
(left to right):
Leslie Goonewardena,
N.M. Perera,
Colvin R. De Silva

30

SPARTACIST

So what was the situation in 1936? First of all, nobody
paid any attention to this question at all. In the internal
bulletin of the French GBL there is one sentence on its
policy in the election — and two pages of discussion in a
later bulletin — compared to more than a hundred pages on
the split with the Mohnier group. Nor was the GBL policy
mentioned in any of the post-June 1936 issues of Lutte
Ouvriere. It was not a big issue. I'm not even sure Trotsky
knew what the GBL policy was; he might have, but it's not
clear. I was looking through the [Trotsky] archives [at
Harvard University], and Trotsky writes big notes over
everything putting triple exclamation points everytime
Vereecken opens his mouth. But here there's no marks at all
on his copy [of the GBL internal bulletin referring to
electoral policy].

Now, why is that? The reason is that the real policy of the
French Trotskyists — and the essential policy of Trotsky at
that time — was, "Not the Popular Front But Committees
of Action!" Here's what the Central Committee said to
somebody who wanted to vote for all of the popular front
candidates: "You have to understand the totality of our
position. We must explain to the proletarians that their fate
will not be played out on the parliamentary terrain. We call
on them to struggle for the revolution on another terrain.
And that's why the electoral questions have an absolutely
secondary aspect" [GBL,Bulleiin Interieur No. 14, 24
April 1936]. Trotsky thought there was going to be a
revolution — "The French Revolution Has Begun," remem-
ber? And his policy was "Soviets Everywhere" — that was
what the first issue of their paper said in June 1936. And
that's what the French Trotskyists did — they came out, and
their main policy was "No to Electoral Cretinism"; you
can't smash the fascists in parliament, you have to have
workers militias. And they went out and formed workers
militias. That's what their real policy was.

Internal bulletin of the GBL: underlining and
annotations in Trotsky's hand

Secondly, I think there's an . explanation for why they
had what we consider a wrong policy, that is, calling for
votes for the workers parties of the popular front. In
France all three factions of the French party were soft on
the Socialist Party — which they had been in and didn't
want to leave [and that influei^ced their policy toward the
popular front^]. Immediately after the popular front was
formed in May of 1935 Trotsky sent a letter to the
International Secretariat arguing that after the StaUn-
Laval pact the Bolshevik-Leninists could no longer remain
in the SFIO and had to prepare for independent existence
["A New Turn Is Necessary," in Writings of Leon Trotsky
(1934-35)]. Molinier said it would be a crime to leave the
Socialist Party. But all three factions in the French party
were begging to be let back into the Socialist Party after
they were expelled. It took them six months to even pass a
resolution for an aggressive policy toward the Socialist
Party.* So that is the context, it's not just Molinier who had
a soft position on the popular front — but all the factions of
the French party did.

I want to emphasize what this leads to. It's Spain. One of
the things that struck me in my research was how
everything in the French, Belgian and American Trotskyist
papers throughout 1936-37 is about Spain. There's almost
nothing about France in the French papers after June
1936. And every faction in the French party, plus
Vereecken and Sneevliet, thought that Trotsky had a
sectarian policy on Spain and that the International
Secretariat had a criminally sectarian policy on Spain,
because the I.S. called for an independent Bolshevik Party
there and said that Nin'k policy of support to the popular
front was a crime. Just about everyone else in Europe,
except for the International Secretariat, thought that
Trotsky was wrong. (Incidentally, Shachtman played a
leading role in the International Secretariat dui'ing that
period.) Trotsky had to call not only the Molinier group,
but also his own supporters to order for publishing articles
praising the POUM.' Vereecken said that the people who
supported Trotsky's position in Spain were a "gang of
adventurers and careerists."

There's a logic to all of this: because their policy was one
of critical support to the workers parties of the popular
front, because they were soft on the popular front, they
said, well, the POUM joined the popular front, unfortu-
nately that was a mistake, but, you know, a mistake is not a
crime. And it led to the following situation: In Spain in
1937 there were two Trotskyist groups — one that support-
ed Trotsky and the International Secretariat, and another
led by a Comrade Fosco that supported Molinier and
Vereecken. During the May Days of 1937 the I.S. group
published the famous leaflet that said "For a revolutionary
government, take the power." The Molinierist group didn't
publish a leaflet because they didn't want to counterpose

^For example, the 2 November 1934 La Verite had a front-page
headline, "Popular Front? Yes, But for Struggle." Or again,
following the municipal elections, "The Popular Front Must
Act" (La Verite, 31 May 1935).

"See Erwin Wolfs "The Mass Paper" (a pamphlet written under
the name Nicolle Braun, translated in Leon Trotsky, The Crisis
of the French Section [1935-36 J).

'E.g., Lutte Ouvriere of 15 August 1936 wrote that "Only the
POUM of all the traditional parties is putting forward slogans
commensurate with the situation and with a class content."

WINTER 1979-80

31

u voz mmk

1

Spain, 1936: POUM welcomes President Azana.
"If the POUM had not marched at the heels
of the anarchists and had not fraternized with
the People's Front,' if it
had conducted an
intransigent
revolutionary policy,
then... it would
naturally have found
Itself borne to the head
of the masses and
would have assured the
victory" (Trotsky). La
Voz Leninista. press of
Spanish Bolshevik-
Leninists,
counterposes
"revolutionary front of
the proletariat" to the
Popular Front.

i,\ Piol.t.ri.Jo

themselves to the POUM and the Popular Front. For they
knew from talking to the POUM leaders that the POUM
was going to call on the workers to withdraw because their
insurrection threatened the popular-front government.'*
They gave "critical support" to the workers party of the
popular front by strikebreaking on a potential revolution.
That's ultimately what it comes down to. So we've already
had this experience. It's not just the POUM — the open
popular frontists who betray — but also centrists who try to
reduce principled questions to mere tactics that can be led
to support the worst betrayal.

Summary by Robertson:

There's a problem in viewing the position of the iSt on
popular fronts as Oehlerite; that is, when one tries to be a
rightist, one is thought, at least vulgarly, to be smarter than
a leftist. Now there's a difficulty in taking the Second
International as an abstraction. The Second International
produced from 1917 to 1919 a rather creditable Communist
International. Presumably one should have something to
do with that before and during that time. But the Second
International in the period of the 1920s was moribund,
rightist and largely [openly] in the arms of the bourgeoisie.
However, the Depression and the rise of fascism and the
rightward turn of the Communist International precipitat-
ed a new leftist development in the Second International
parties in the early 1930s. It is wrong to have an invariant
tactic toward the Socialist Party through these three
periods as some comrades would do. Not only is that
indifferent to the question of revolutionary opportunity
versus betrayal, it's not even intelligent.

'"See Frank Mintz and Miguel Pecifta, Los Amigos de Durruti.
los trotsquistas y los sucesos de mayo (Madrid, 1978).

Now, regarding the question of the JVP, the issue is one
of how the JVP is seen, not what it is. The JVP is seen on
that island as a militant, if insurrectionary opposition that
means business. We compared it with the Chilean MIR
which is, of course, no flattery to the JVP — they merely
prepare a new version of a popular front. But on the
evidence available to us, the LSSP-R — now the RWP — is
only viewed as the far left — with a principled backbone — of
the old LSSP. And the fact is that Trotskyism in Ceylon,
which used to be predominant among the workers — is now
bypassed by a factor of a thousandfold.

Comrade Norden did all this fine research on a very con-
fused situation in the French section in the mid-30s. Faced
with these complexities, I took a different route. The
American Trotskyist organization was unsplit, a principal
mouthpiece of Trotsky, and it operated under purely
parliamentary conditions in that period. So I chose to use
the American Trotskyists as the model for what Trotsky and
the Fourth International meant [generally] in that time.

Popular frontism existed in the United States in the late
1930s in the form of the Roosevelt candidacy for president
and the LaGuardia candidacy for mayor of New York. In
1936 the labor bureaucrats, social democrats, Stalinists
and bourgeois democrats invented a new workers party,
the American Labor Party. It was created to bring a few
hundred thousand crucial votes in New York State into the
Democratic camp. Toward this experiment, and toward
every candidacy of the post-split SP and the CP, the
Trotskyists had an implacable and central opposition in the
name of opposition to the popular front and to every single
party that supported the popular front. So much so that
until that time the Trotskyists in the United States had
largely ignored electoral politics. But faced with the
popular-front issue, the SWP was pushed to running its
own candidacies for the first time in order to underline its
electoral opposition to popular frontism. And they were
Trotsky's mouthpiece. ■

32

SPARTACIST

Popular Front

Not a Tactic But
"The Greatest Crime"

"The question of questions at present is the People's
Front. The left centrists seek to present this question as a
tactical or even as a technical maneuver, so as to be able to
peddle their wares in the shadow of the People's Front. In
reality, the People's Front is the main question of
proletarian class strategy for this epoch. It also offers the
best criterion for the dif-
ference between Bolshevism and
Menshevism. For it is often
forgotten that the greatest
historical example of the
People's Front is the February
1917 revolution. From February
to October, the Mensheviks
and Social Revolutionaries,
who represent a very good
parallel to the 'Communists' and
Social Democrats, were in the
closest alliance and in a perma-
nent coalition with the bourgeois
' party of the Cadets, together with
whom they formed a series of

coalition governments. Under the sign of this People's
Front stood the whole mass of the people, including the
workers', peasants', and soldiers' councils. To be sure, the
Bolsheviks participated in the councils. But they did not
make the slightest concession to the People's Front. Their
demand was to break this People's Front, to destroy the
alliance with the Cadets, and to create a genuine workers'
and peasants' government.

"All the People's Fronts in Europe are only a pale copy
and often a caricature of the Russian People's Front of
1917, which could after all lay claim to a much greater
justification for its existence, for it was still a question of
the struggle against czarism and the remnants of feudal-
ism." [emphasis in original]

— Leon Trotsky, "The Dutch Section and the

International" (15-16 July 1936), in Writings of

Leon Trotsky (1935-36)

"For the proletariat, through its parties, to give up its
own independent program means to give up its
independent functioning as a class. And this is precisely
the meaning of the People's Front. In the People's
Front the proletariat renounces its class independence,
gives up its class aims — the only aims, as Marxism
teaches, which can serve its interests. ... The People's
Front is thus thoroughly and irrevocably non-
proletarian, anti-proletarian.

"By its very nature, the People's Front must be so.
The establishment of the People's Front, by definition,
requires agreement on a common program between the
working-class and non-working-class parties. But the
non-proletarian parties cannot agree to the proletarian
program — the program of revolutionary socialism —
without ceasing to be what they are. ...

"The People's Front, understood in its fundamentals,
is the major form of the preparation among the masses
for the achievement of national unity within the
democratic nations in support of the coming war. Under
the slogans of the People's Front, the masses will march
forth to fight for 'their own' imperialism. . . .

"Thus, the People's Front is the contemporary version
of social-patriotism, the new form in which the betrayal
of 1914 is to be repeated." [emphasis in original]
— James Burnham,-77je People's Front:
The New Betrayal (1937)

"26. Reformist-Dissidents [the followers of Jean
Longuet] are the agency of the 'Left Bloc' within the
working class. Their success will be the greater, all the
less the working class as a whole is seized by the'idea
and practice of the united front against the bourgeoisie.
Layers of workers, disoriented by the war and by the
tardiness of the revolution, may venture to support the
'Left Bloc' as a lesser evil, in the belief that they do not
thereby risk anything at all, or because they see no
other road at present.

"27. One of the most reliable methods of
counteracting inside the working class the moods and
ideas of the 'Left Bloc,' i.e., a bloc between the workers
and a certain section of the bourgeoisie against another
section of the bourgeoisie, is through promoting
persistently and resolutely the idea of a bloc between all
the sections of the working class against the whole
bourgeoisie — "

"31. The indicated method could be similarly employed
and not without success in relation to parliamentary and
municipal activities. We say to the masses, 'The Dissidents,
because they do not want the revolution, have split the
mass of the workers. It would be insanity to count on their
helping the proletarian revolution. But we are ready, inside
and outside the parliament, to enter into certain practical
agreements with them, provided they agree, in those cases
where one must choose between the known interests of the
bourgeoisie and the definite demands of the proletariat, to •
support the latter in action. The Dissidents can be capable

WINTER 1979-80

33

of such actions only if they renounce their ties with the
parties of the bourgeoisie, that is, the 'Left Bloc' and its
bourgeois discipline.'

"If the Dissidents were capable of accepting these
conditions, then their worker-followers would be
quickly absorbed by the Communist Party. Just because
of this, the Dissidents will not agree to these conditions.
In other words, to the clearly and precisely posed
question whether they choose a bloc with the
bourgeoisie or a bloc with the proletariat — in the
concrete and specific conditions of mass struggle — they
will be compelled to reply that they prefer a bloc with
the bourgeoisie. Such an answer will not pass with
impunity among the proletarian reserves on whom they
are counting." [emphasis in original]

— Leon Trotsky, "On the United Front" (2 March
1922), in The First Five Years of the Communist
International, Vol. 2

"The job of the cartel [the "cartel de la gauche," or "Left
Bloc," in France] always consisted in putting a brake upon
the mass movement, directing it into the channels of class
collaboration. This is precisely the job of the People's
Front as well. The difference between them — and not an
unimportant one — is that the traditional cartel was
applied during the comparatively peaceful and stable
epochs of the parliamentary regime. Now, however,
when the masses are impatient and explosive, a more
imposing brake is needed, with the participation of the
'Communists'

"The coming parliamentary elections, no matter what
• their outcome, will not in themselves bring any serious
changes into the situation: the voters, in the final
analysis, are confronted with the choice between an
arbiter of the type of Laval and an arbiter of the type of
Herriot-Daladier. But inasmuch as Herriot has
peacefully collaborated with Laval, and Daladier has
supported them both, the difference between them is
entirely insignificant, if measured by the scale of the
tasks set by history." [emphasis in original]

— Leon Trotsky, "France at the Turning Point" (28
March 1936), in Leon Trotsky on France

W:.

r': : *****

"The July days [in Spain] deepen and supplement the
lessons of the June days in France with exceptional force.
For the second time in five years the coalition of the labor

.parties with the Radical bourgeoisie has brought the
revolution to the edge of the abyss. Incapable of solving a

■ single one of the tasks posed by the revolution — since all
these tasks boil down to one, namely, the crushing of the
bourgeoisie — the People's Front renders the existence of
the bourgeois regime impossible and thereby provokes the
fascist coup d'etat. By lulling the workers and peasants with
parliamentary illusions, by paralyzing their will to struggle,
the People's Front creates favorable conditions for the
victory of fascism. The policy of coalition with the
bourgeoisie must be paid for by the proletariat with years

of new torments and sacrifice, if not by decades of fascist
terror."

—Leon Trotsky, "The New Revolutionary Upsurge and
the Tasks of the Fourth International" (July 1936), in
filings of Leon Trotsky (1935-1936)

\

"What was inexcusably criminal on the part of the
[Spanish] Socialist party, the Communist party and the
Maurin-Nin party of 'Marxist Unification' was not only
that they wrote a 'common program' with the discredited
bourgeois parties — which was bad enough — and that
thereby, politically speaking, they appeared before the
masses in one party with the bourgeoisie, but that this
'common program' was dictated and written by the
bourgeoisie, and that in every other respect the joint
party — under the pseudonym of the 'People's Front' — was
dominated by the bourgeoisie." [emphasis in original]
— Max Shachtman, "The Spanish Elections and the
People's Front," New Militant, 14 March 1936

"In France the Popular Front took shape as the union on
a reformist program of the working-class parties with the
great 'middle-class' Radical-Socialist Party. There were no
such parties in the United States, but the same social forces
nevertheless operated under similar conditions, and the
United States equivalent of the Popular Front was simply
the New Deal Roosevelt Democratic Party."

— "Editor's Comments," New International,
December 1938

*****

"It is the specific question of LaFollette and LaGuardia.
The movements backing them are not dreams, but the
genuine, homespun authentic American type of 'Farmer-
Labor' and 'Labor' Party. And what sort of movements are
they? About this no elaborate argument is needed. Are they
'anti-capitalist'? Not one of their leaders would dream of
pretending so. They are dedicated heart and soul to the

preservation of capitalism Are they 'free of all

entanglements with capitalist parties'...? How absurd:
their chief task in 1936 was to gather votes for Roosevelt.
Do they run genuine representatives of the proletariat for
office? LaFollette and LaGuardia are the answer.

"The Farmer-Labor Progressive Federation and the
American Labor Party are both vicious muddles of class
collaboration. Popular Frontism, outworn Populism and
atavistic liberalism, the docile instruments of labor
bureaucrats and careerist 'progressive' capitalist
politicians.

"Support of these movements at the present time in
actuality represents the perspective of the liquidation of
independent working-class politics. That is the long and
short of it."

— "A Manifesto to the Members of the Socialist Party,"
Socialist Appeal, 14 August 1937 ■

34

SPARTACtST

Document of the First Delegated
Conference of the iSt

77?^ following are excerpts from the main document
adopted by the first delegated conference of the
international Spartacist tendency. The more narrow
organizational material has been deleted.

*****

The "Declaration for the Organizing of an Interna-
tional Trotskyist Tendency" (DOITT) adopted in the
summer of 1974 codified the modest but significant
geographical expansion of the international Spartacist
tendency (iSt). Declaring that the Spartacist League of
the United States (SL/U.S.) and the Spartacist League
of Australia and New Zealand were the nucleus for the
crystalization of an international Trotskyist tendency,
the document noted: "In a half dozen other countries
parties, groups and committees have expressed their
general or specific sympathy or support for the
international Spartacist tendency, as have scattered
supporters or sympathizers from a number of additional
countries." Continued development of the iSt has only
confirmed the assertion in DOITT that "The struggle for
the rebirth of the Fourth International promises to be
difficult, long and above all uneven." The iSt has yet to
transcend the framework characterized in DOITT as "a
tendency in the process of consolidation." Nevertheless,
significant growth in Europe, the development of a
leading international cadre incommensurate with the
present federated International Executive Committee
(lEC) and the prospect of unification with the
Revolutionary Workers Party of Sri Lanka (RWP)
place on the agenda the first delegated international
conference of the iSt and the election of an authoritative
lEC as a necessary step toward the goal of forging the
International Trotskyist League.

Against American-Centeredness

The iSt has been progranlmatically internationalist
from its inception. The organizational predecessor of
the SL/U.S., the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) of the
Socialist Workers Party (SWP), took as one of its
founding documents "World Prospect for Socialism."
The RT thereby linked itself with Gerry Healy's
Socialist Labour League and the International Commit-
tee (IC), the international opposition to the SWP's
capitulation to Pabloite revisionism. Healy's criminal
bureaucratism in splitting the RT in 1962 and in the
expulsion of Spartacist from the London conference in
1966 badly set back the struggle against Pabloite
revisionism within the ostensible world Trotskyist
movement as well as in the U.S., and imposed upon the
Spartacist League, founded in 1966, a prolonged period
of involuntary national isolation. DOITT (published in
Spartacist No. 23, Spring 1977) codified the extent to
which this national isolation had been breached by 1974,
but it also indicated the degree to which the internation-
al extension of the iSt was tenuous and reversible.

Given the small growth of the SL/U.S. relative to the
growth of the iSt elsewhere especially in Europe since
DOITT was adopted, the deforming preponderant
weight of the SL/U.S. in the iSt has been reduced but by
no means redressed. A majority of the lEC as well as the
entirety of the Interim Secretariat (I.S.) are SL/U.S.
members, in large measure the result of the 15-year
history of the SL/U.S. and the relative immaturity of the
other sections. However, given this, the political
backwardness of the American working class combined
with its present relative quiescence, broken recently only
by the mine workers strike of 1978, imposes potentially
damaging pressures on the iSt. These pressures are
compounded by the fact that the iSt's slender links to the
organized proletariat are concentrated entirely within
North America where they are indeed modest and not
immune to attrition and disorientation engendered by
the dormant class struggle.

It is particularly important, given the backwardness
of the American working class, that the sections of the
iSt do not perceive the extremely modest trade-union
work of the tendency in North America as normative,
although this work contains a major (but not the sole)
reservoir of experience in the labor movement for
the iSt.

There is a similar tendency to see the SL/U.S. as the
organizational norm by smaller sections whose tasks are
more modest. While in broad outline the organizational
practices of the U.S. section are the application to an
organization with its size and tasks of the evolved
practices and norms of the Leninist and Trotskyist
movement, other sections of the iSt must make the
corresponding adjustments in terms of scale and
concrete tasks

It has been mentioned that having neither the direct
authority of triumphant proletarian revolution nor that
of a world-historic figure like Trotsky, the iSt has sought
to maintain programmatic and organizational coher-
ence in part by dependence on modern technology (jet
planes, overseas telephones and the xerox machine).
This is particularly the case given the relative political
inexperience of most of the cadre of the iSt. Often it has
required a struggle with various sections to enter the
latter half of the 20th century (e.g., obtaining sufficient
telephone capacity). It is highly probable that the
present composition of the iSt would not exist as a
cohesive international tendency if it were operating on
the resources of the Trotskyist movement of the 1930s.

...The heavy dependence of the iSt on money,
particularly on SL/U.S. financial resources, poses the
following contradiction: ... the U.S. is entering a
recession which must necessarily damage that financial
base and threatens a significant contraction of interna-
tional work. At the same time, the possibility of
substantial recruitment to the SL/U.S. in the next

WINTER 1979-80

35

period has been posed. Realizing this potential will also
require cadre and financial resources. But in the SL/
U.S., as in the other sections, recruitment is one road to
maintaining and expanding our financial base.

Indicative of the uneven development of the iSt since
the adoption of DOITT is that our most significant
organizational extension, the founding of the Spartacist
League of Britain (SL/B) as our second-largest section,
accentuates the overwhelming disproportion in the
tendency of the English-speaking sections. It is
exemplary of this disproportion that, of the stable and
regular newspapers produced by sections of the
international tendency, all four are English-language.
The French and German presses remain unstable,
infrequent and irregular. . . .

Special Preference for the Non-Anglo-
American Sections

The iSt remains committed to overcoming this
disproportion, which is one that characterized the split
in the 1950s between the IC (centered on English-
speaking sections) and the International Secretariat.
One of the motivations for cutting back Workers
Vanguard to a bi-weekly was to free cadres to assist the
work of the iSt outside North America. . . .

The Anglo-American-centeredness of the iSt was
further accentuated by the personally tragic but almost
inevitable demise of the Chilean Organizaci6n Trotski-
sta Revolucionaria (OTR) under the pressures of exile
and a lack of cadre resources for the tasks of a tiny
propaganda group. As a consequence, perspectives for
work both in Latin America and Spain have been set
back. . . . With regard to the Far East, we have hardly
begun to penetrate the exotic character of Japanese
ostensible Trotskyism. Through our fusion with the
Trotskyist Faction (TF) of the Workers Socialist
League in Britain and the foundation of the SL/B, the
iSt has acquired an important circle of Near Eastern
supporters. Further, in the aftermath of the powerful

confirmation of our line in Iran, we have contacted in
several countries Iranian exile individuals and groups
who are repelled by the disgusting capitulation of every
other left tendency to Shi'ite clerical reaction.

The most important and also most difficult
opportunity for the extension of the iSt is the proposed
unification with the RWP of Sri Lanka. Except for exile
groups like the OTR or isolated individuals, ... unifica-
tion with the RWP presents our tendency with its first
opportunity to crystalize a section in the colonial world.
This unity would incorporate into our tendency the
invaluable, decades-long experience of Comrade
Edmund Samarakkody as a Trotskyist leader in South
Asia and his struggle to extract from the notorious
opportunism of ostensible Trotskyism in Sri Lanka an
authentic revolutionary Marxist movement. At the
same time, given the magnitude of the outstanding
political differences, the enormous geographical dis-
tances and the divergences in culture and living
standards, unification with the RWP is the most
difficult extension the iSt has ever sought to undertake.

Sectional Leadership Problems

All of the sections outside of the U.S. face, to one
degree or another, the problems of cohering a stable
leadership collective. Such developments seldom take
place by linear progression. A study of the history of
how such a leadership was cohered in the SL/U.S.
reveals the importance of faction fights, anti-clique
fights and the necessary political struggles which
accompany adapting tasks to changing conditions. The
demise of the civil rights movement combined with the
opening of opportunities in SDS and the Ellens/Turner
faction fight, the "Transformation Memorandum" and
the anti-clique fights with Cunningham/ Moore/
Benjamin/Treiger are key examples. It was these fights
and over a decade of common work that gave the SL/
U.S. cadre its cohesion. Other sections should not
continued on next page

IHtATYWlTHVlETNAMl/SRaqTACIST

Invasion of Vietnam by
China, in collusion with
U.S. imperialism, sharply
posed the issue of Soviet
defensism. Right:
Spartacist contingent in
New Yoric demonstration,
24 February 1979.

^.-^aii GARTERS ;

36

SPARTACIST

necessarily expect the cohesion of their leaderships to
come less painfully or more rapidly.

Outside of the U.S. all of the sections are led by
comrades (most of whom as individuals have more than
a decade in the Marxist movement) who constitute a
completely new or partially tested collective leader-
ship.... In Britain the Trotskyist Faction was qualita-
tively co-equal in size with the preexisting station and
composed of comrades whose political experiences were

shaped by the British far left The task of crystalizing

a cohered British leadership remains on the agenda.

The leadership of the German TLD [Trotzkistische
Liga Deutschlands] has been broadened organically as
the recruitment by ones and twos of leading cadres from
opponent organizations has repeatedly posed the
necessity of their integration into the leadership. . . .

Recently the West Coast CC [Central Committee]
group expressed concern that the SL/U.S was losing its
communist cutting edge. The past prolonged period of
social quiescence fostering routinism and complacency
has markedly affected the SL/U.S. — from the Central
Office administration to the Workers Vanguard
Editorial Board to the youth organization to the trade-
union fractions — with occasional disastrous consequ-
ences. Nonetheless, the organization has demonstrated
the resilience to break out of the office-bound or
parochial outlook when opportunities do arise. The fine
and energetic work during the 1978 United Mine
Workers strike, the 1978 New York City election
campaign, the work around the Iran issue and lately in
response to the victimization of a leading trade-union
militant reveal this capacity. The youth organization
will bear most of the burden in the coming year for
pushing and directing the recruitment drive. It should be
noted that the section has suffered enormously from the
lack of a Trade Union Commission and, less pressing
but also important has been the lack of centrally
directed black work.

Outside of the SL/U.S. we continue to confront the
inherent instability of one- or two-branch sections. One-
branch "sections" (TLC [Trotskyist League of Canada],
LTF [Ligue Trotskyste de France] and previously the
TLD) are schizoprenic locals which are concentrated in
one city but are forced to assume some of the
responsibilities of a national section. There is a tendency
under these conditions to seek to replicate parallel
organizational structures for "national" and "local"
work leading to cumbersome and ineffectual organiza-
tional arrangements. Where sections have two branches
the second branch tends/to be weak and in the long term
unviable — Periodic transfer and reorganization of
cadre have been compelled

The young comrades of the Lega Trotzkysta d'ltalia
(LTd'I) have shown an inadequate grasp of the
methodology of Leninism on the importance to the
working class of the fight to defend democratic rights.
This has led to disputes in the past... which must be
expected to resurface in new forms. At the same time,
their political work, energetically pursued, has been in
the direction of fusion with the iSt. The I.S. recom-
mends that this fusion take place at the international
conference.

Station Stockholm has functioned persistently as a

valuable literature distribution, contacting and infor-
mation gathering outpost despite its isolation. . . .

Tasks Facing the iSt

Most of the European recruitment took place during
the period of detente when the question of the popular
front was of immediate and decisive importance. This
recruitment took place on the basis of intransigent
opposition to electoral support, no matter how
"critical," to workers parties in popular frontist
coalitions. This had its correlative in the U.S. where the
SL/U.S. made its greatest recruitment during the height
of the antiwar movement when opposition to class
collaborationist "peace" coalitions, the American
embodiment of the popular front for that period, was a
principal axis of our political intervention. Since a
significant section of the iSt was forged in steadfast
opposition to popular frontism, the proposed unifica-
tion with the RWP can be faced with greater confidence,
though one of our principal differences is over critical
electoral support to workers parties in the popular front.

An acid test for cadre development and the
development of the sections is their response to a period
of renewed imperialist anti-Sovietism whose most
dramatic expression has been the forging of a U.S.-
China alliance and the Chinese invasion of Vietnam.
The Russian question will necessarily intrude directly
into the political life of every section. The Trotskyist
position of unconditional defense of the gains of the
October Revolution will have the same cutting edge as
our opposition to the popular front in West Europe and
Chile had in the previous period.

The perspective of our sections in Germany, France
and Britain must center on regroupment. To this end the
TLD and LTF now face the task of stabilizing a regular,
correct, interventionist press as a main priority. This is
not merely a question of editorial and technical capacity
but of political leadership and perspective. . . . The TLD
in particular, but all the smaller sections, must aim to
gain a feel for social reality in their country by seeking
industrial employment on an individual basis, dealing
with current social issues in their press and selling their
newspaper at the plant gates. But in the short run, as the
negative examples of Canada and Australia have
demonstrated, "trade-union work" is the enemy of a
regroupment orientation. The SL/B has gained suffi-
cient forces, by virtue of its successful regroupment, to
begin industrial implantation. And in the long run the
TLD must transcend its historic resistance to trade-
union implantation, a resistance which is rooted in the
pre-capitalist caste vestiges in modern German society,
and find the road to a modest but real presence in the
organized German proletariat. But in this period we will
make our gains by aggressive political intervention with
our full program. Our presses will be the main tools for
qualitative growth.

The failure to develop operational youth perspectives
including constituting indigenous campus fractions in
Europe has deterred recruitment and le necessary
forging of links to the volatile student/youth layer. This
work must accompany regional traveling and aggressive

WINTER 1979-80

37

Portugal, 1975— Watershed in OCI's
slide to reformism. As Soares' SP
was spearheading reactionary
mobilization against PCP and
proletarian militancy, OCI called
for a "SP-PCP government led
by Soares. "

INFORMATIONS
OUVRIERES

TRIBUNE UBRE DE lA LUTTE DES CLASSES

opponents work. Only the SL/U.S. and the SL/ANZ
have carried out genuine youth work in the last period.

The Need for an Elected lEC

While each of the sectional leaderships outside that of
the U.S. is still in the process of being assembled or
consolidated, an international leadership has been
forged in the past period through joint campaigns and
common political struggles. (E.g., the Munoz campaign,
the authoritative international delegations to the 27
April 1978 "Orderly Retreat" PBand the February 1979
TLD emergency conference, the building of the British
section which from the establishment of the station...
was a truly international undertaking, and the interna-
tionally orchestrated propaganda campaigns waged
over Iran and the Chinese invasion of Vietnam.) This
international leadership has acquired tested working
relations and a fund of common experience which make
the proposal for an elected I EC both realistic and
necessary.

Our tendency is now constrained by the formally
semi-federated lEC on which only full Central Commit-
tee members of full sections carry decisive votes. This
lEC is not commensurate with our evolved international
leadership.... Therefore the I.S. proposes that the
delegates to the international conference now elect an
International Executive Committee.

Workers Vanguard has been the main organ of our
tendency internationally. This has had a strongly
positive effect in aiding the homogenization of our
tendency but has also augmented the U.S.-centricity.
The Spartacist is intended to be the theoretical and
documentary history of our movement. Its continuing
infrequency in English, French and German has been
one of the major failings of the I.S. Spanish Spartaqist,
even though it is backed up by no Spanish-speaking
section and has generated no important contacts, does
reach a modest number of cadre of the ostensible
Trotskyist movement in Spain and in Latin American

exile concentrations elsewhere We could, for

example, seek to shift vital forces from the SL/U.S. to

rejuvenate from the center the quadri-lingual Spartacist
while not qualitatively weakening the SL/U.S. press
capacity.

The iSt, Ostensible Trotskyism and the
Russian Question

Carter's "human rights" campaign, reviving the
rhetoric of the Cold War in order to morally re-arm U.S.
imperialism after Vietnam and Watergate, has condi-
tioned a rapid shift to the right on the part of the
ostensible Trotskyist movement. The products of the
factionally sundered International Committee have
undergone qualitative degeneration. The political
banditry and organizational gimmickry of the Healyites
have taken them out of the workers movement and into
the environs of Colonel Qaddafi of Libya. The other
major component of the former IC, the French OCI of
Pierre Lambert, has kept in step with Carter's anti-
Soviet crusade and carried its Stalinophobia to new
heights. They have adopted the slogans of the pope
regarding national rights in East Europe and the slogans
of Konrad Adenauer regarding German unification.
Thfe OCI has moved so far to the right that there is now a
clear convergence with the reformist SWF except where
adaptation on respective national terrain to their own
bourgeoisie causes one to take a position to the right of
the other. (E.g., the SWF on "free speech for fascists,"
the OCI on the popular front or East Europe.) With the
degeneration of the decomposition products of the 1971
IC explosion, the claim of the iSt to represent the
continuity of the anti-Pabloite struggle of the pre- 1 967
IC has been strengthened.

The USec, torn by years of bitter factional warfare,
achieved a troubled peace on a more right-wing basis
during the period of the French Union of the Left.
Spurred by the demise of the petty-bourgeois leftism of
the Sixties, the impressionistic international majority
led by Ernest Mandel dumped its role as publicity agents
for Che Guevara and became the brokers for the left
wing of the popular front. Virulent anti-Sovietism
continued on next page

SPARTACIST

embodied in the campaigns for Soviet dissidents became a
common platform of the popular front in Europe — the
pledge demanded from the Stalinists by the Social
Democrats guaranteeing that their allegiance to their own
bourgeoisie would exceed their allegiance to the Kremlin.
Thus, central to the recent shift of the USec majority was a
backtracking on the Russian question which paralleled the
earlier social democratization of their main factional
opponent, the American SWP, and facilitated the con-
junctural convergence.

The USec majority has most recently embraced the anti-
Soviet parliamentary cretinism of the Eurocommunists.
This continuing political slide has been accompanied by the
growth of a sizable right wing including substantial support
in the LCR for the pro-OCI tendencies. The OCI has now
become essentially reformist. Thus the USec majority's
abandonment of even formal obeisance to the Trotskyist
position on the Russian question leaves to the iSt alone the
heritage of Soviet defensism.

As shown by the dramatic polarization over Portugal
and Angola, the contradictions between the centrists and
reformists in the USec still have potentially strong
centrifugal force despite the present evident political
convergence. When the class struggle reaches an acute pre-
revolutionary situation, the paper unity between centrists,
whose omnivorous appetites pursue any opportunity, and
reformists, who go after the main chance — conciliation
within their own state power (frequently under the fig leaf
of the popular front) — will tend to blow apart. The
Pabloite method of substituting alien class forces for the
proletarian, internationalist revolutionary party is of
course the same for both wings of the USec. Only the

particular appetite, conditioned by national terrain, is
different. The European-based centrists adapt to the
Stalinists . . . who in turn capitulate to their own bourgeoi-
sie. The American SWP, in the absence of a mass reformist
party, capitulates directly to the liberal wing of the
bourgeoisie.

Should either the centrist or reformist forces acquire real
weight in a particular national situation, the convenience of
"internationalism" will be expendable. Sectoralism can go
by the board as some sectors are found to be "more equal
than others." The American SWP's shameless reversal of
its "gay power" enthusiasm, t6 grease the wheels for entry
into the trade-union bureaucracy, is but an indication of
this — and without an immediate real chance to consum-
mate betrayal within the labor movement.

The pressure to revise the characterization of Cuba as a
healthy workers state has been an abiding irritant between
the two wings of the USec. In sharp contrast to its social-
democratic anti-Sovietism the SWP has opted to continue
and intensify its adoration of the Cuban Stalinists. The
USec majority, no longer interested in tailing petty-
bourgeois guerrillaism, would prefer instead to call Cuba a
"bureaucratized workers state." The Cuba discussion is
indicative of the USec's fundamental disorientation over
Stalinism and again exposes the basis of the '63 reunifica-
tion. Because of the iSt's uniquely incisive position on
postwar Stalinism, we should aim our polemics toward this
USec weak spot. No serious Marxist can analyse Cuba
without reference to iSt material on this subject.

But the dispute over Cuba is pfesently academic
compared to the disgusting spectacle of the entire USec
prostrate before the ayatollahs in Iran. The USec has gone
so far in its hailing of the mullahs that it has refused, in the
U.S. and Australia, to engage in common defense work for
its comrades in Khomeini's prisons with those who attack
their jailers! The iSt's unique line of "Down with the Shah!
Down with the Mullahs!," so obvious from a Marxist or
even democratic viewpoint, continues to receive powerful
vindication from events which we must exploit to the
utmost. In addition, the Iranian struggle has demonstrated
the more central role of the woman question in the
countries of the East. The programmatic consequences of
the slogan "No to the Veil!" must be a part of our
regroupment perspectives.

Likewise, over the Chinese invasion of Vietnam, the line
of the iSt was not only correct but powerful and popular. It
vindicated our tendency's two decades of principled
struggle for a Trotskyist analysis of post-World War II
Stalinism. For the USec, however, the Chinese invasion of
Vietnam prompted a recrudescence of the old factional
alignrnents in an ongoing, long-winded debate where both
sides are united by their agreement to avoid the question of
Soviet defensism, placed squarely on the agenda by the
U.S.-China alliance and U.S. collusion with the Chinese
invasion.

The rightward shift within the ostensible Trotskyist
movement has meant that small groups with international
connections which once existed to the left of the USec —
Massari, the "third tendency," the Spartacusbund — have
all either made their peace with Pabloism or virtually
disintegrated. In Britain there is still a myriad of tiny
groups to the left of the IMG who call themselves
Trotskyist and continue to offer the SL/B targets for
regroupment and linear recruitment.

In Germany our recent focus on discrediting the

International Spartaclst
Tendency Directory

Ligue Trotskyste de France

Le Bolchevik, BP 421 09
75424 Paris Cedex 09, France
Spartaclst League/Britain

Spartacist Publications
PO Box 185

London, \A/C1H 8JE, England

Trotzkistische LIga Deutschlands

Postfach 1 67 47

6000 Frankfurt/Main 1, West Germany

Spartacist League/U.S.

Box 1377, GPO
New York. NY 10001, USA
Spartacist Stockholm

Spartacist Publishing Co.
Box 4508

102 65 Stockholm, Sweden

Trotskyist League of Canada

Box 7198, Station A

Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Spartacist League of
Australia/New Zealand

GPO Box 3473

Sydney, NSW, 2001, Australia

WINTER 1979-80

39

Trotskyist pretensions of the GIM has produced a trickle of
young recruits. But the GIM is so wretched that a
generation of subjectively revolutionary youth, mistaking
the GIM for Trotskyism, have turned instead to Maoism.
Given the unabashed counterrevolutionary foreign policy
of China, this Maoist milieu has been in a crisis which the
TLD must seek to intersect. Regarding France, ... the LTF
is at an historic impasse. They confront three ostensible
Trotskyist organizations with thousands of supporters.
And behind them is the industrial working class dominated
by the CP/CGT which have the appearance, even to our
own comrades at times, of an unassailable monolith. But
ever since 1789 there has been in France a massive social
explosion about every generation. The LTF must prepare
for the next such explosion by vigorous recruitment efforts
and the stabilization of a real newspaper. If it is able to act
with correctness and vigor, it should be able to exploit the
ensuing regroupment opportunities and perhaps emerge
with a few hundred new members and as a significant factor
in the French left.

We are no longer in that period, following the USec's
"Tenth World Congress" in 1974, when the two major
factions of the USec were on opposite sides of the
barricades in Portugal. At that time there could have
emerged out of the USec a left opposition to both the
centrist majority and reformist minority, an opposition -
which took a principled revolutionary stand against
popular frontism. But while that opportunity may have
passed, the model programmatic basis for revolutionary
regroupment presented at that time retains its validity for
those left-moving forces seeking genuine Trotskyism. This
basis was outlined in a draft declaration by cadres expelled
from or driven out of the USec who now adhere to or
support the iSt:

■ No political or electoral support to popular fronts; for
conditional opposition to workers parties in open or
implicit class-collaborationist coalitions;

■ Uphold the Trotskyist theory of permanent revolution;
for proletarian leadership of the national/ social struggle;

■ For military support to petty-bourgeois nationalist
forces fighting imperialism, but absolutely no political
support to such forces; for Trotskyist parties in every
country;

■ For unconditional defense of all the deformed/
degenerated workers states against imperialism; for
political revolution against the bureaucracies; no
political support to competing Stahnist cliques and
factions;

■ Against violence within the workers movement;

■ For communist fractions in the unions, based on the
Transitional Program;

■ For the communist tactic of the united front from above;
for the tactic of regroupment to unite subjective
revolutionists in the vanguard party; for intransigent
exposure of centrism;

■ Rejection of the claims of ostensibly Trotskyist
Internationals to speak for the Fourth International,
destroyed by Pabloism in 1951-1953;

■ For the reforging of a democratic-centralist Fourth
International which will stop at nothing short of the
dictatorship of the proletariat.

Interim Secretariat

New York 1 August 1979

Young Spartacus

Newspaper of the Spartacus Youth
League, youth section of the
Spartacist League/U.S.

$2/10 issues

Make checks

payable/mail to:

Spartacus Youth

Publishing Co.

Box 825, Canal St. Station

New York, N.Y. 10013

A Workers Vanguard Pamphlet

Here is the true story
of the Great Coal Strike
of 1978— from the
miners' side of the
barricades. Not just
reporting but hard
analysis... and a
program for victory!

Price $1.50

Order from/ make checks payable to:

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P.O. Box 1377 G. P.O. New York, NY 10001

For panyttfodelsen av
Fjarde Internationalenl

Dokument fran
den trotskistiska
oppositionens kamp i KAF

SPARTACIST STOCKHOLM
Sympatisorgrupp till internationella
Spartacist tendensen

5KR

Spartacist Publishing Co.

Box 4508

102 65 Stockholm

Sweden

40 ^ WINTER 1979-80

Toward

ttl6

International
Trotskyist —

League !

The very first delegated international conference, highest
body of the international Spartacist tendency (iSt), was
held in Britain in late summer. Voting delegates attended
from the Spartacist League/U.S., Spartacist League of
Australia/New Zealand, Trotzkistische Liga Deutsch-
lands, Spartacist League of Britain, Ligue Trotskyste de
France and Trotskyist League of Canada, along with
observers from these and other countries.

Also attending were three representatives of the
Revolutionary Workers Party of Ceylon (RWP), a small
Ceylonese left-centrist current headed by veteran Sinhalese
Trotskyist Edmund Samarakkody, and nine members of
the Lega Trotzkysta d'ltalia, a grouping of very youthful
Pabloist-derived militants.

The nearly 300 delegates and iSt observers were drawn
from the more experienced layers of the tendency. The
average age was over 29; political history averaged nearly
five years in the iSt and seven and a half years in organized
leftist politics, from a wide variety of political back-
grounds. There were former members of the pro-Moscow
(U.S., France, Austria), pro-Peking (U.S., Canada,
Germany) and "Eurocommunist"-type (Australia) Stalin-
ists and of various social-democratic organizations; former
"third camp Trotskyists" (Shachtman, ClifO; "anti-
jrevisionist Trotskyists" from the British, American and
Israeli Healyites and French and German Lambertists; and
ex-members of more eclectic currents: the IWW, Posadas
tendency (Italy), MIR (Chile), Black Panthers, women's
and "gay" (homosexual) radical groups. But by far the
largest number of comrades won from opponent organiza-
tions came from the United Secretariat (USec).

In 1964 our founding cadres were expelled from the

American SWP for our left opposition to the USec's
capitulation to Castro, dubbed by the SWP/ USec an
"unconscious Trotskyist." Our principled political struggle
against Pabloist dissolution of the Trotskyist vanguard
party into bourgeois-nationalist and Stalinist formations
was met with political suppression and trumped-up
disciplinary charges not only by the SWP, which was
already in hard pursuit of deepening reformist appetite, but
also by the centrist USec, which hid behind the toothless
Voorhis Act (inhibiting international political affiliation)
to refuse to hear our appeal.

We had to defend our principled stance for international
democratic centralism not only against the Hve-and-let-live
USec but also against the International Committee of
Healy/ Lambert, which claimed to represent the continuity
of Trotskyism while then functioning according to a
variant of the practices of Zinovievist "Cominternism."
The IC applied a ruthless "discipline" to its small sections
but preserved a mutual hands-off attitude toward its
English and French organizations.

Our tendency has been built through principled
regroupments. Even when we had no presence outside
North America, our founding cadres insisted that the
maintenance of a revolutionary program requires the
subordination of any national revolutionary organization
to an international collective. But that collective cannot be
scotch-taped together in the manner of the USec, but must
be forged in the struggle for programmatic cohesion. As the
USec and its competing ostensibly Trotskyist "internation-
als" have proceeded from rotten-bloc alliances to jagged
continued on page 16

SPARTAOST

NUMBER 29

SUMMER 1980

50 CENTS

f ghanistan and the Left

The Russian
Question
oint Blani(

Afghanistan is a flash of lightning which illuminates the real contours
of the world political landscape. It has exploded the last illusions of
detente to reveal the implacable hostility of U.S. imperialism to the
Soviet degenerated workers state. It has stripped away all diplomatic
cover for Washington's alliance with Maoist/ Stalinist China. And
it has confronted the left inescapably with "the Russian question":
the nature of the state originating in the Bolshevik Revolution
and its conflict with world capitaUsm. continued on page 2

Haii Red Army!

Counterrevolution in Afghanistan:

The Khomeini Connection 5

SWP/HKE: The Blood Is On Your Hands! 6

The Bolsheviks and the "Export of Revolution" 8

Open Letters to the Parity Committee 10

The Anti-Spartacists 14

Leninist Factlon-SL/B Declaration of Fusion 18

2

spArtacist

Afghanistan and the Left...

(continued from page 1)

For revolutionary socialists there is nothing tricky,
nothing ambiguous about the war in Afghanistan. The
Soviet army and its left-nationalist alHes are fighting an
anti-communist, anti-democratic melange of landlords,
money lenders, tribal chiefs and mullahs committed to
mass illiteracy. And to say that imperialist support to this
social scum is out in the open is the understatement of the
year. U.S. "national security" czar Zbigniew Brzezinski
actually traveled to the Khyber Pass and rifle in hand
incited the insurgents: "That land over there is yours and
you will go back one day because your cause is right and
God is on your side." The gut-level response of every
radical leftist should be fullest solidarity with the Soviet
Red Army. •

Yet much of the left, with the Maoists leading the pack,
has joined the imperialist crusade against "Soviet expan-
sionism." In fact, the official pro-Peking group in the U.S.,
the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) attacked the
Carter Doctrine from the right as too soft on the Russians.
Likewise, the "Third Camp" social-democrats, like the
British Cliff group, which could maintain a certain left
posture in the days of detente, stand once more revealed as
State Department socialists. Those leftists, whatever they
call themselves, who deny that the Soviet Union is a
proletarian state power (albeit bureaucratically degenerat-
ed) find themselves, some more, some less willingly, on the
same side of the barricades as U.S. imperialism.

It is not surprising that the Maoists and social democrats
should rally to imperialist anti-Sovietism, although some
may bridle at making common cause with the crazed anti-
communist Brzezinski and his Afghan cutthroats. But for
Trotskyists, support to the Soviet army in Afghanistan
should be an elementary political reflex. Trotsky's last
great factional struggle, against the "Third Camp"
Shachtman/Burnham opposition in the American Social-
ist Workers Party (SWP) in 1940, was provoked by the
imperialist campaign against the Soviet invasion of "little,
democratic Finland." Drawing the hardest line against

English Edition

SPARTAOST

(Fourth Internationalist)

An Organ of Revolutionary Marxism

Organ of the International Executive Committee of the
International Spartacist tendency

EDITORIAL BOARD: Joseph Seymour (editor), Helena Broslus,
Elizabeth Gordon, Jan Norden, Charles O'Brien, James Robertson,
Reuben Samuels, John Sharpe, David Strachan
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Box 1377, Q.RO., New York, N.Y. 10116. Telephone: 732-7862

Opinions oxpressed In signed articles or letters do not necessarily
express the editorial viewpoint.

Number 29 x ^23 Summer 1980

social-democratic anti-communism, Trotsky declared:
"The safeguarding of the socialist revolution comes before
formal democratic principles."

And the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan has a far
more progressive content than Stalin's action in Finland in
1940, where the Kremlin simply wanted a slice of territory
for defensive military purposes, moreover, in the context of
an alliance with Nazi Germany. A victory for the Islamic-
feudalist insurgency in Afghanistan will not only mean a
hostile, imperialist-allied state on the USSR's southern
border. It will mean the extermination of the Afghan left
and the reimposition of feudal barbarism — the veil, the
bride price. Moreover, fhe Soviet military occupation
raises the possibility of a social revolution in this
wretchedly backward country, a possibility which did not
exist before.

Yet much of the ostensibly Trotskyist movement is also
dancing to Carter's tune over Afghanistan. The most
outright counterrevolutionary position is that of the
unstable bloc between the Stalinophobic reformists of the
French Organisation Communiste Internationaliste (OCI)
and the followers of political adventurer Nahuel Moreno.
They not only demand the withdrawal of Soviet troops, but
actually solidarize with the reactionary Islamic insurgents!
(See "Morenoites Call for Counterrevolution in USSR,"
Spartacist No. 27-28, Winter 1979-80.)

The United Secretariat (USec) has, predictably enough,
split three ways over the question. A large minority, whose
foremost spokesman is Tariq Ali, demands Soviet
withdrawal in the name of self-determination for Afghani-
stan. The leadership around Ernest Mandel too condemns
the Soviet intervention for violating national rights, but
grudgingly admits that to now call for withdrawal would
amount to support to imperialist-backed counterrevolu-
tion. The American SWP supports the Soviet action but
deliberately minimizes its significance.

SWP Skirts the Russian Question

Long seeking to become a pressure group on the liberal
bourgeoisie, the SWP has presented opposition to U.S.
imperialist militarism almost exclusively by reference to
the democratic right of national self-determination. It was
"heroic, little Cuba" and later "heroic, little Vietnam"
against the American colossus. Social revolution in the
colonial world was reduced to series of contests between
various "Third World" Davids and the U.S. Goliath. In this
way the SWP echoed and so reinforced the liberal notion
of imperialism as big-power bullying of and military
intervention 4nto small countries.

But now it is Jimmy Carter who is appealing to liberal
"anti-imperialism" and even Third World nationalism over
the Soviet invasion of "little, independent Afghanistan."
The imperialist media go on about "Russia's Vietnam,"
evoking sympathy for poor villagers with their primitive
weapons battling the mechanized army of a "superpower."

How does the SWP justify its support to the Soviet
intervention in Afghanistan without confronting liberal,
anti-Communist prejudices? No easy task this. The SWP
tries the line that Washington is mainly reacting against
"the Afghan revolution" rather than the Soviet expansion.
That's right. "The Afghan revolution"— this world-historic
event which threatens imperialist domination in Asia!

"It was not Moscow's increased influence in Afghanistan
that alarmed Washington— though there was some

SUMMER 1980

3

T^^^fesc^" % KKaf O'i?

No To % OmHoUf^LSl

— ^wtot * ^"'^

Workers Vanguard

March 1980, Washington, D.C.: Spartacist contingent in anti-draft demonstration defends Soviet Union
against imperialist war-mongering.

concern over that — but the Afghan revolution itself and its
repercussions throughout central Asia. The imperialists
were opposed to the social gains that had been won by the
Afghan workers and peasants and feared that the
revolution would advance toward the overthrow of
capitalist property relations."

— "How Washington Instigated Counterrevolution
in Afghanistan," Intercontinental Press,
14 January 1980
So the SWP can play its old liberal refrain of "self-
determination for the Afghan revolution." The Soviet role
is here reduced to merely aiding a revolution in a small
country attacked by imperialism, a role comparable to that
which it played in Cuba and Vietnam:

"So the issue is not Soviet intervention, but a growing U.S.
intervention — aimed at taking back the gains won by the
Afghan masses — that finally forced the Soviet Union to
respond."

— Militant, 15 February

Everyone knows that, of course, the issue is Soviet
intervention or, more precisely, the incorporation of
Afghanistan into the Soviet bloc through social revolution
from without as in East Europe.

Although the SWP has written numerous articles on "the
Afghan revolution," one is hard put to find a class
analysis of the revolution, the government which issued
out of it or the state. Rather, in Stalinist or bourgeois-
nationalist fashion, the post- April 1978 government is
described as "revolutionary," "popular," "progressive,"
"anti-imperialist," etc.

The April 1978 "Revolution": What Happened?

Key to understanding what has happened in Afghanistan
since April 1978 is that for decades the country has been a
Soviet client state. A large fraction of the country's thin

educated stratum was trained in the USSR, and much of
the intelligentsia regarded the Soviet Union as a source of
social progress. And for good reason. An Afghan
schoolteacher looking across the northern border at Soviet
Central Asia, two generations ago as wretchedly backward
as Afghanistan, today sees a literate, relatively modern
society where women are no longer degraded slaves.

The generally pro-Soviet sympathies of the Afghan
intelligentsia manifested themselves organizationally with
the establishment of the People's Democratic Party of
Afghanistan (PDPA) in 1965. A pro-Moscow, petty-
bourgeois radical party, the PDPA was composed of
schoolteachers, university students, government officials
and, not least important, army officers. The party had no
base among the peasant masses nor among the tiny urban
working class.

In 1967 the PDPA split between the Khalq (Masses)
faction led by Noor Mohammad Taraki, one of the
country's best-known poets, and the Parcham (Banner)
faction led by Babrak Karmal. The difference between the
factions is hard to fathom, and may have been cliquist in
nature. Both groups adhered to a strategy, consistent with
their social composition, of capturing and radicalizing the
weak governing apparatus. Officers loyal to the PDPA-
Parcham played a major role in overthrowing the
monarchy in 1973, and the party participated in the first
bourgeois-nationalist Daud government.

Subsequently Daud moved right and in early 1978
decided to crush the PDPA, now shakily reunited. When
police assassinated a PDPA leader and others were
arrested, mass demonstrations, mainly composed of
continued on next page

4

SPARTACIST

Left-nationalist PDPA
regime distributes land to
poor peasants (right). This - ^ ^
spurred reactionary uprising
of landlords, moneylenders
and mullahs.

students and government office workers, broke out in
Kabul. In the ensuing showdown the PDPA military
fraction outgunned Daud's men; Daud himself was killed.
Thus was born the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.

The April 1978 "Revolution" was essentially a left-wing
military coup with a certain popular support among the
intellectuals. Unusually, the PDPA officers turned the
main governmental posts over to the civilian wing of the
party. But the real power remained in the military.
Hafizullah Amin emerged as the strongman of the new
regime because he had previously been in charge of the
PDPA's work within the officer corps.

Glorifying "the Afghan revolution" so as to minimize the
significance of the Soviet intervention, the SWP conjures
up a non-existent mass workers' and peasants'
insurrection:

"Then, in April 1978, the Afghan masses rose up and

fought to change these oppressive conditions

"Tens of thousands of Afghan workers and peasants took
to the streets, a section of the army rebelled, a new
government came to power."

—Militant, 18 January 1980

The narrow, petty-bourgeois elite social base of the new
PDPA regime is described in late 1978 by the knowledge-
able radical journalist Fred Halliday. Although a support-
er of "the Afghan revolution," Halliday, unlike the SWP
charlatans, respects empirical truth:

"What has occurred is the seizure of power by a radical
sector within the state apparatus, led by civilians (most of
them teachers or other kinds of civil servant) aided by
army officers. . . .

"The new regime's implantation outside the main urban
centers is very weak, and the inevitable temptation will be
to rely on the armed forces rather than the party to
implement policies

"At the same time, the lower ranks of the State
apparatus— both civilian and military — remained
untouched, and in particular it was evident that the
possibility of counterrevolutionary resistance from the
lower ranks of the armed forces had not been eliminated
merely by the removal of the top officers."

— "Revolution in Afghanistan," New Left Review,
November-December 1978

The left-nationalist PDPA came to power in one of the

most primitive, tradition-bound countries on earth.
According to the United Nations Statistical Yearbook for
1978, only 35,000 people were employed in manufacturing
out of a population of 17 to 20 million. At the same time,
there were a quarter of a million mullahs, paid by the
government, an enormous parasitic caste sucking the blood
from a desperately poor people.

These few statistics indicate the limits to social change
from within Afghan society. Unlike in neighboring Iran or
Pakistan, a proletarian revolution is rjot possible in '
Afghanistan. The country is too absolutely economically
backward. On the other hand, the social base for
reactionary resistance to even the most moderate
bourgeois-democratic reforms is strong.

Despite this the PDPA regime launched an ambitious
(for Afghanistan) series of democratic reforms — land
redistribution, cancellation of peasant debts, reduction of
the bride price to a nominal sum, compulsory education for
both sexes, moves toward the separation of church and
state. In particular it was the regime's steps toward the
equality of women which most fueled the reactionary
uprising. And this is recognized even by bourgeois
journalists who have covered the Afghan "freedom
fighters." The New York Times (9 February) reporter
observed:

"Land reform attempts undermined their village chiefs.
Portraits of Lenin threatened the religious leaders. But it
was the Kabul revolutionary Government's granting of
new rights to women that pushed Orthodox Moslem men
in the Pashtoon villages of eastern Afghanistan into
picking up their guns."

The Left-Nationalist Regime Besieged

By all accounts the PDPA regime acted with a
bureaucratic commandism and arbitrariness which alienat-
ed many of its potential supporters, especially among the
rural poor. The example commonly given is the cancella-
tion of peasant debts to the landlords. The landlords
retaliated by withholding seed grain and, since the
continued on page 21

SUMMER 1980

5

Counterrevolution in Afglianistan:

The Khomeini Connection

Much of the left, notably the Maoists, has taken a
consistent counterrevolutionary line in tailing Khomeini's
clericalist dictatorship in Iran and opposing the Soviet
intervention against the feudaUst insurgency in Afghani-
stan. The fake-Trotskyist American Socialist Workers
Party (SWP), however, has chosen to support Islamic
reaction in Iran while opposing it in Afghanistan. It has
become common in SWP literature to couple the "Iranian
and Afghan revolutions," hoping no one will notice that the
Iranian "revolution" led by the mullahs is belligerently
hostile to the Afghan "revolution" and the Soviet Red
Army.

The SWP blithely claims that what is happening in
Afghanistan "is not a war of Muslims against atheists"
(Doug Jenness, The Truth About Afghanistan, March
1980). This unusual — one might even say unique — view is
contested by an eminent authority whom the SWP deeply
respects. Back in June 1979 Ayatollah Khomeini himself
summoned the Soviet ambassador and declared: "Afghani-
stan is an Islamic country and their problems should be
solved in an Islamic way {New York Times, 13 June 1979).

A Radio Teheran broadcast last September was explicit
in anti-Soviet Islamic bellicosity:

"Afghanistan will remain ablaze until right wins victory.
This is the oath made in the mountains and valleys with the
rising of the sun every day by thousands of Afghan fighters
who are advancing toward the bastion of atheism in
Kabul...."

— cited in Fred Halliday, "War and Revolution in
Afghanistan," New Left Review, Jan.-Feb. 1980

Khomeini's regime was second only to General Zia's
Pakistan in providing political and material support to the
feudalist insurgency against the Soviet-backed Kabul
regime.

Early this year the Soviet government assumed total
control of the Afghan "revolution" through a coup. The
Iranian foreign ministry promptly denounced it as a
"hostile act against Iran and all Moslems of the world"
{New York Times, 5 February). The SWP rushed to excuse
the Iranian position as the nefarious work of those who did
not follow the imam's Hne (the imam at the time suffering
from a heart ailment): "Immediately after Soviet troops
began moving into Afghanistan in large numbers, the
Iranian Foreign Ministry issued a statement denouncing
the move, but Khomeini himself did not speak out against
it" {Intercontinental Press, 21 January). But when the
imam got back in action, he disobliged his SWP lawyers by
declaring "unconditional support" for the Afghan feudal-
ists: "We totally support the brave and Moslem people of
Afghanistan" {New York Times, 12 February).

On the few occasions when the SWP admits the relations
between Teheran and Kabul are not exactly sisterly, it
blames the conflict on the latter's "sectarianism." This is the
tack taken by the Jenness pamphlet (and is in keeping with
the SWP's condemnation of the Iranian Fedayeen's
"sectarianism" in defending their very lives against

Time

Khomeini's criminal gangs).

Jenness goes on to commend Kabul for sending a
message to Khomeini proposing fraternal relations right
after the Soviet-backed coup. But the Stalinists at least
took some account of reality. As part of the Kremlin's
current "peace offensive," Kabul announced Soviet troops
could be withdrawn from Afghanistan if the U.S., China,
Pakistan and Iran ended their support to the reactionary
forces {New York Times, 15 May). At least when their own
heads are at risk, the Stahnists are less conciliatory to the
reactionary theocracy in Teheran than the shameless
SWP.B

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SWP/HKE: The Blood Is On
Your Hands!

The following leaflet by the New York Spartacist League
was distributed at a Socialist Workers Party (SWP) forum
on Iran on May 4 just days after the most savage attack to
date by Khomeini's Islamic reaction against the Iranian
left. The main target of this attack was the left-populist
Fedayeen, which fought back against the right-wing
student and lumpen gangs. Yet the SWP and its Iranian
proteges,, the HKE, actually defended Khomeini's blood-
purge of the left, denouncing the Fedayeen as "sectarian"
for defending themselves.

We recognize that the construction of a Trotskyist party
in Iran will no doubt draw many of its cadres from those
who prove able to transcend the left-Stalinist limitations of
the Fedayeen. The Fedayeen are fighters, against the shah
and — reluctantly — against the attacks of the clerical right.

By contrast, the HKE has never fought anyone for
anything. Its core cadres were trained as petty^bourgeois
students in the U.S. in the "peaceful, legal" school of the
reformist S WP. Only a few months before the outbreak of
mass struggles against the shah, these craven opportunists

rejected the slogan, "Down with the shah!," as ultra-left.
They gained further notoriety by fingering rival Iranian
student radicals to the Houston cops. All this was good
practice for their current role in Iran, where a decade from
now the HKE will be remembered as the "leftists" who
justified the murderous right-wing attacks on the Feda-
yeen. The most significant thing the HKE will ever do is to
hideously discredit the name of Trotskyism in Iran.

The HKE learned its criminal tailism of Islamic reaction
from the SWP, which more so than any other large
American left group has glorified the Khomeiniite
movement. While the SWP did not literally term the veil
"progressive," as incorrectly stated in the leaflet, it does
defend this barbaric institution of women's enslavement:
"Some women who never wore the veil are now doing so as
a symbol of national liberation. Some wear it in opposition
to western dress styles that turn women into sex objects."
—"Revolution Opens Road to Liberation of
Women," Intercontinental Press,
17 December 1979
The future cadres of a revolutionary Trotskyist party in
Iran will have to absorb the lessons that Khomeini and his

SUMMER 1980

7

mullahs did not "betray" the revolution but intended from
the beginning to build a clerical dictatorship, and that
genuine national liberation from imperialism requires a
struggle leading the oppressed masses to the dictatorship of
the proletariat.

*****

Crazy Carter's bungled imperialist "Mission Impossible"
in Iran demonstrates he will do anything to stay in office as
he drives toward World War III. The Spartacist League
says, "Hands Off Iran!" But unlike the SWP and their
cohorts in Iran, the HKE, we do not defend the equally
crazy "Imam" Khomeini who also will do anything to
consolidate his Persian chauvinist, Shi'ite Islamic theocra-
cy. Khomeini opposes imperialism only when it stands in
the way of plunging Iran back into the seventh century. He
has no qualms about using American Phantom jets and
helicopter gunships to massacre Kurdish rebels in
Sanandaj. He offers "unconditional support" to his fellow
Islamic clergymen in Afghanistan when they are tools of
U.S. imperialism and the CIA. Khomeini and the Afghan
mullahs and the U.S. imperialists know that their main
enemy is the Soviet Union. It was the October Revolution
which broke the reactionary social power of mosque and
bazaar as it liberated the Moslem borderlands from
imperialist subjugation. We call for unconditional military
support to Iran against imperialist attack in order to open
the road for the October of the Iranian working masses
which will sweep away Khomeini and all the exploiters,
capitalist and pre-capitalist.

During April dozens of leftist students were murdered
and hundreds were injured as Khomeini sent his "Islamic
Revolution" onto the campuses to "purge" them of
"Marxist" influence. At Friday evening prayer services on
April 18, the prayer leader at Teheran University called for
ridding the campuses of pictures of Lenin and hammers
and sickles. Within hours Teheran University was stormed
by knife-, club- and gun-wielding Islamic thugs, the
Hezbollahi or "people of the party of god." These are the
lumpen gangs recruited and bribed by the mosque with
CIA money to bring down bourgeois-nationalist prime
minister Mossadegh in 1953 and restore the shah to power.
The Hezbollahi attacks upon the left, nationalist and
secular organizations last August paved the way for
Khomeini to ban all political parties and papers, making
the universities the last refuge of organized left-wing
propaganda. Now Khomeini has determined to completely
annihilate such groups as the populist Fedayeen Khalq, the
radical Islamic Mujahedeen and the pro-Moscow Stalinist
Tudeh. The Fedayeen who barricaded themselves in
buildings at Teheran University report that twenty of their
comrades were murdered. In provincial universities the
Islamic goons were even more vicious. At the university in
Shiraz more than 400 were injured.

The SWP/HKE have praised the veil, the symbol of the
Islamic enslavement of women, as "progressive" (which is
like praising the chains of a black slave as "progressive");
they have denied the right of the oppressed nationalities of
Iran to self-determination; they have supported Khomei-
ni's Persian chauvinism to the point of backing Iran in their
border war with Iraq; they have hailed as "brothers" the
Pajflfars— "revolutionary guards"— the hated butchers of
the workers, leftists, Kurds, Arabs and other minorities.

Now they have carried their criminal support to Khomei-
ni's "Islamic revolution" to its logical conclusion: they hail
the bloody purge of leftists on the campuses and denounce
as "sectarian opposition" those who try to defend their
organizations and their very lives from the Shi'ite clergy's
stormtroopers.

The SWP — like Carter over his Iranian military
escapades — has taken full responsibility for its Iranian
cronies' defense of the massacre of leftists. In an article
titled "Why Carter Fears 'Unraveling Authority' in Iran"
{Intercontinental Press, 5 May / Militant, 9 May), the SWP
quotes from an HKE statement published on April 21 at
the height of the Islamic goon attacks upon campus leftists:
"The Tudeh Party, Mujahedeen, Fedayeen, Paykor and
other so-called Marxist organizations, which always start
from their own narrow, sectarian interests, have essentially
opposed this brave action. These forces, under the pretext
of defending the 'barricade of freedom' (these organiza-
tions think that reaction has taken over the country and
that the campuses are the last bastion) have mobilized
against the action of the ISOs [Islamic Student Organiza-
tions]."

The ISOs were the first to mobilize around Khomeini's
demand for the "Islamification" of the universities.
Hezbollahi merely carried out this demand in a "revolu-
tionary" fashion. Khomeini's governing "Revolutionary
Council" then adopted this slogan and closed the
universities in order to complete the "Islamification."

This recent betrayal places the HKE far to the right of
Tudeh which was so subservient to Khomeini that they
have been derisively referred to as "assistant ayatollahs."
By this act the HKE is traitor to every principle the labor
and socialist movements stand for. As if to compound their
crime by showing the spoils as well as the dead bodies, the
Militant carries in the middle of its article a large photo
caption showing the last of the imprisoned HKE members
leaving jail and stating that "in Iran, deepening revolution-
ary ferment has created an atmosphere open to debate of
different viewpoints." Tell that to the Fedayeen who lost 20
comrades at Teheran University. With the SWP's full
approval, the HKE has offered up the lives of Iranian
leftists to Islamic reaction to save their own skins. But for
the East the 1965 Indonesian coup demonstrated on a
massive and catastrophic scale, for thoSe even remotely
connected to the left, that opportunism saved nobody's
skin including their own. ■

womRS meuARP

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8

SPARTACIST

Trotsky addresses Red Army during revolutionary war against Pilsudski's Poland.

The Bolsheviks and

the ''Export of Revolution"

Of all the fake-left tendencies that have opposed the
Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan, not many have
tried to rationalize their objectively pro-imperialist line by
referring to the policies of Lenin's Bolsheviks. One such
attempt to misuse historical analogies, made by the Klon-
skyite Peking-loyal Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist)
[CP-ML] in the U.S., is particularly noteworthy because it
takes the form of a polemic against the Spartacist League.

In an article entitled "Trotskyites: Moscow's New
Cheerleaders" the CP-ML's Carl Davidson singled out
our slogan "Hail Red Army in Afghanistan!" as the "best
example" of Trotskyist support to so-called "Soviet
expansionism" {Call, 28 January). Most of Davidson's
diatribe is devoted to trying to prettify the Afghan mullahs
and tribal chiefs leading the "freedom fighters." But the
article winds up by linking our Soviet defensist position to
what Davidson claims is the original sin of Trotskyism:
"The problem is that they are wedded to a piece of dogma
that goes all the way back to Leon Trotsky himself. Part of
Trotsky's ultra-'leftism' was the argument that, since it was
impossible to build socialism in one country, especially

where the majority were peasants, then the new Soviet
power would have to save itself by launching its armies on
the rest of Europe. This view of 'exporting revolution' was
blasted by both Lenin and Stalin as ridiculously and
dangerously adventurist, even at a time when the Soviet
Union was revolutionary."

The assertion that we advocate "Soviet expansionism" is
a patent lie, as is obvious to anyone who reads our press.
But by adding this charge to Trotsky's alleged support for
"exporting revolution," Davidson hopes to hoodwink those
unfamiliar with the Stalinist school of falsification. For this
slander isn't Davidson's brainchild. It comes straight out of
the Stalinist "classics." For example, S. Rabinovich's
revisionist History of the Civil War (1935) condemns
Trotsky for allegedly wanting to "bring the revolution to
Europe on the bayonets of the Red Army."

A reexamination of the question of "revolution from
without" is in order in view of much of the left's support to
the imperialist hue and cry over Afghanistan. For even as
the Bolsheviks rejected the program of "revolution from

SUMMER 1980

9

without," they still upheld the principle and perspective of
using the Red Army to promote revolutions abroad.

The Russo-Polish War

The issue of making "revolution from without" arose
among the Bolsheviks as a result of the Russo-Polish war of
1920. Its formulation and the ensuing debate were
organically linked to the course and outcome of that war.

In April 1920 Joseph Pilsudski, the bourgeois-
nationalist "Liberator" of Poland, launched an
unprovoked attack on the Soviet forces in the Ukraine.
Backed by French imperialism, Pilsudski had ambitions to
recreate "Greater Poland" by bringing the Ukraine and
parts of the Baltic states back under Polish rule. The Soviet
government, which had been desperately trying to
negotiate a peace with Poland, was taken unprepared and
was forced to abandon Kiev and much of the Ukraine. But
the Red Army mustered fresh forces and in June launched a
successful counterattack that sent the overextended Polish
armies reeling in disorderly retreat. By the end of June the
Soviet armies had advanced almost unopposed right up to
the border of national Poland. The question was then
posed point blank: whether to conclude peace with
Pilsudski or to go over to the offensive in a revolutionary
war against Poland? It was this agonizingly difficult
question that the Bolshevik Politburo debated.

No Bolshevik leader considered revolutionary war
against Pilsudski's Poland impermissible in principle.
Rather the debate centered on two interrelated, empirical
questions. One, would the Red Army's advance into
Poland ignite a proletarian uprising leading to
peasant aid to the Soviet forces, mutinies among
Pilsudski's troops, etc.? Two, how would the Soviet
peoples, devastated by six years of war and civil war, stand
up to a new major war? The stronger the indigenous
revolutionary forces in Poland, the less the demands on the
offensive capacity of the Red Army and behind it on the
Russian and Ukrainian masses.

Of the top Bolshevik leaders Trotsky alone advocated
negotiation of an immediate peace with Poland. Writing
later in his 1930 autobiography, Trotsky explained his
position as follows:

"Even more perhaps than any one else, I did not want this
war, because I realized only too clearly how difficult it
would be to prosecute it after three years of continuous
civil war

"A point of view that the war which began as one of
defense should be turned into an offensive and revolution-
ary war began to grow and acquire strength. In principle,
of course, I could not possibly have any objection to such a
course. The question was simply one of the correlation of
forces. The unknown quantity was the attitude of the
Polish workers and peasants."
— My Life

Trotsky believed that a Russian offensive against
Pilsudski could hope to succeed only if a proletarian
revolution broke out early on in Poland. And he had good
reason to doubt that a communist revolution in Poland was
so imminent. He listened to the sober estimates of such
leading Polish Communist emigres as Julian Marchlewski
and Karl Radek. Marchlewski evidently spared no effort to
persuade the Russian Politburo not to undertake the
invasion of Poland. But perhaps none was so opposed to a
war with Poland as was Radek, who believed that Russian
troops marching on Polish soil, even if they raised the

banner "For our freedom and yours!", would be regarded
by the masses as conquerors and not liberators. Radek
urged the Bolshevik leaders to let the Polish revolution
mature on its own before sending Russian troops to its aid.

There was a definite logic to this position. If the Soviet
government were to conclude a peace with Pilsudski, then
both the Red Army and the Polish Communists would buy
time to better gather forces for the offensive. If Pilsudski
were to reject a generous Soviet peace offer, making war
inevitable, then the Polish masses would be able to see
clearly who was the real aggressor.

Of the other Bolshevik leaders Lenin was most resolutely
in favor of going over to the offensive against Poland. No
doubt Lenin was impressed by the effect on the Soviet
forces of Pilsudski's attack on the Ukraine. The Red Army
certainly appeared ready and willing to rout the retreating,
demoralized units of the Polish army. But what seemed to
have clinched the question for Lenin were the reports he
received from resident Polish Communists like Felix Kon
and P.L. Lapinski. Kon and Lapinksi, who came from the
anti-Luxemburgist wing of the old Polish socialist
movement and would therefore presumably be sensitive to
the national sentiments of the Polish masses, predicted
imminent revolution in Warsaw.

Moreover, Lenin fixed his gaze on Berlin. Revolution
indeed seemed imminent in Germany. Only a few months
eariier the German proletariat had defeated the right-wing
Kapp putsch with a general strike and also had prevented
French munitions shipments from reaching Poland after
Pilsudski's attack on the Ukraine. In a revolutionary war
against Poland the stakes were enormous. A Soviet Poland
would remove the last bulwark sealing off the October
Revolution from Germany. If only the Soviets could
deliver the coup de grace to Pilsudski, the entire Treaty of
continued on page 29

Joseph
Pilsudski's
unprovoked
attack on
Soviet Ukraine
led Bolsheviks
to launch
revolutionary
war on Poland.

10

SPARTACIST

Open Letters to the
Parity Committee

Beset for years by endemic factionalism, Ernest
Mandel's Potemkin Village "Fourth International," the
United Secretariat (USec), lost perhaps a third of its
membership last fall when the international followers of
Latin American political adventurer Nahuel Moreno, the
Bolshevik Faction (BF), split. While posturing as a left
opposition within the USec, the Morenoites then turned
around and made a rotten bloc with the social-democratic,
virulently anti-Soviet, French-centered organization of

You Call for
Counterrevolution In
East Germany

Frankfurt
8 May 1980

Open Letter to the Members of the Parity Committee
Comrades:

The Parity Committee has repeatedly issued calls for an
"Open Conference" of "all forces claiming to be Trotsky-
ist." The Parity Committee has called for national
gatherings to prepare such a conference before the end of
\9m {Tribune Ouvriere No. 6, 29 February 1980). A direct
invitation to participate was sent to the TLD via your
Hamburg BF supporter M. in November of last year. The
TLD, German section of the iSt [international Spartacist
tendency], hereby accepts the invitation to be present as
observers at such national gatherings and at the "Open
Conference."

At the same time we recognize reality for what it is. The
"Parity Committee" is not a "united front" but a rotten bloc
between Lambert and Moreno with some formally
orthodox rhetoric on Nicaragua as window-dressing to
cover its real purpose: an organizational maneuver to
trump Mandel by playing the card of "unity." The German
components of the Parity Committee disagree on central
political issues, not least of all on the question of the
Trotskyist program, uniquely represented by the TLD.
German BF sympathizers have in the past expressed their
readiness to discuss with the TLD the political questions on
which the Parity Committee is ostensibly based. In contrast
Werner Uhde, a member of the CC of the International
Workers Association (ISA), which is affiliated to the
FLambertist] Organizing Committee for the Reconstruc-
tion of the Fourth International, has publicly stated: "The
Parity Committee has decided that the iSt stands outside
the workers movement" — an offensive and utterly ground-
less slander, worthy of a Gerry Healy or a Stalin.

Pierre Lambert. The Moreno j Lambert lash-up, called the
Parity Committee, has called for an "open conference" of
"all forces claiming to be Trotskyist." Since some militants
might be taken in by the Parity Committee's pretensions to
"orthodox" Trotskyism, we responded to this "unity"
maneuver through a series of open letters. We reprint
below the letter of the Trotzkistische Liga Deutschlands
(TLD) and lengthy excerpts from that of the Ligue
Trotsky St e de France (LTF).

Given the political differences within the Parity
Committee, its calls for the "unity" of ostensible Trotsky-
ists make a mockery of a principled fight for programmatic
clarity, for reforging the Fourth International. And on
Afghanistan, the question on which the forces of the Parity
Committee are in agreement, they have adopted a
counterrevolutionary position. Thus the Italian section of
the BF headlined its article on Afghanistan "Soviet Troops
out of Afghanistan" {Avanzata Proletaria, 12 January)
and, wholly in line with the OCI [Organisation Commu-
niste Interna tionaliste]/ Parity Committee position that the
movements led by Khomeini and the Afghan mullahs do
not have a "religious character," called for spreading the
"Iranian revolution" into the Soviet Union — that is, for
capitalist restoration! This is not surprising coming from
the ISA, which would love to see Helmut Schmidt
overthrow Hqnecker, in order to install an SPD regime in a
reunified — capitalist — Germany. But it should destroy any
illusions in the "leftism" of the Parity Committee on the
part of anyone seriously considering himself a Trotskyist.
And Moreno's idealization of Third World bonapartists,
even in their most anti-communist form, might logically

Photoworld

1953 East Berlin workers uprising pointed toward
revolutionary reunification of Germany.

SUMMER 1980

11

"Son of Per6n" Nahuel
Moreno (left) meets
"son of Mitterrand"
Pierre Lambert (right).

lead to the formation of an "Imam Khomeini Brigade" to
fight the Red Army in Afghanistan.

Whose Side Are You On?

When Afghan reactionaries and their Maoist aUies
attacked comrades of the TLD with knives on account of
the TLD's position of defense of the Soviet Union,
seriously wounding Fred Z., the Swedish section of the
Bolshevik Faction issued a principled statement, saying
that they considered it "our clear duty . . . to soHdarize with
the victims of this reactionary attack and [we] defend to the
extent of our power those exposed to such a deliberate
attack." Individual members of the BF in Germany also
supported a protest statement circulated by the TLD. The
ISA, to the contrary, refused to defend the TLD, even
going so far as to say (together with the Islamic fanatics and
the anti-Soviet Maoists) that the attack was "fully justified"
(phone conversation with leading Bedin Lambertist
Ingeborg S.).

SPD

The ISA, with its usual groveling poHcy toward the SPD
[Social Democratic Party], callsforvotingfortheSPDinthe
coming elections. The BF, in an effort to appear to the left,
opposes voting for the SPD. But this is scarcely out of
principled opposition to the SPD's alliance with the FDP
[bourgeois-liberal Free Democratic Party] and its anti-
working-class policies. For Moreno published a paper in
Argentina "under the discipline of the High Council of
General Peron" and in the mid-70s urged a vote for the
popular front"FrenteAmplio" in Uruguay. All thisismerely
a cynical effort on the part of the Morenoites to attract those
forces within the GIM [MandeHte Gruppe Internationale
Marxisten] who are against voting for the SPD.

What will be the Parity Committee's position on the
German elections? The USec has already offered us a farce,
with the same issue of Was Tun explaining that while the
(bare) majority of the GIM opposes voting for the SPD,
Ernest Mandel and the USec are in favor of it. And this is
all presented as "democratic centralism"! When history
occurs the first time as farce, what can the Parity
Committee version of it be?

ISA: Call for Counterrevolution in the DDR

The Morenoites made much ado about their criticisms of

the wretched USec document "Socialist Democracy and
the Dictatorship of the Proletariat," loudly proclaiming
that... the "existing proletarian dictatorships" — that is to
say the deformed and degenerated workers states — were a
million times [no less] superior to the bourgeois democracy
existing in the imperialist countries" {La dictature
revolutionnaire du proletariat, pp. 249-250).

And with this position they are, of course, in the same
organization with the ISA, which calls for the "uncondi-
tional reunification of Germany" through "free elections in
all Germany without preconditions." That is to say, a
capitalistically reunited Germany under Helmut Schmidt,
who, with his Stammheim prison, would in a situation of
revolutionary upsurge certainly not take a back seat to
Scheidemann and Noske.

In contrast to the long-standing social-democratic
Stalinophobia of the OCI/ISA (anyone who opposes the
evil StaHnists must be good, including the people who go
around shooting communist school teachers in Afghani-
stan, a country with 90 percent ilHteracy), the TLD stands
for unconditional defense of the social gains of the
deformed and degenerated workers states, while simultane-
ously calling for a political revolution to overthrow the
Stahnist bureaucrats and for the international extension of
the proletarian revolution. The revolutionary reunification
of Germany can take place only when, under the leadership
of a Trotskyist party, the masses carry out the political
revolution in the DDR [East Germany] and the social
revolution in West Germany. While placing no trust
whatsoever in the bureaucracy, we defend the right of these
states to defend themselves against imperialist attack and
against attempts at capitalist restoration within, even when
the bureaucrats' bankrupt policies lead to "defense" by
such bureaucratic methods as the Berlin Wall.

Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter the Parity
Committee

In West Germany the Parity Committee simply means
subordination to the ISA's social-democratic Stalinopho-
bia, to its deep entrism into the SPD, to its love for Helmut
Schmidt.

However, in an effort to provide an orthodox cover for
their power politics (Lambert and Moreno dividing the
continued on next page

12

SPARTACIST

world between them in their own wretched version of
Potsdam), the Parity Committee raises a number of issues
of genuine importance. In order to seriously debate these
issues, as well as to point to the unprincipled character of
the Parity Committee, we wish to be present at the "Open
Conference." But in fact the Parity Committee cannot
afford to permit such a debate to take place. For only the
international Spartacist tendency has systematically
defended Trotskyist positions on the issues raised by the
Parity Committee.

We have, since the inception of our tendency in the '60s,
fought for the position that the Fourth International was
destroyed as the world party of socialist revolution by
Pablo, Mandel & Co. in 1951-53— and therefore for the
necessity of reforging the Fourth International (and not
patching together some rotten bloc and calling it the
"reconstructed" or "reorganized" Fourth International).

From 1960-61 the Revolutionary Tendency, predecessor
of the iSt, fought against the capitulation of the SWP
[American Socialist Workers Party] leadership to Castro
and for the position that Cuba had become a deformed
workers state: for this reason we opposed the 1963
reunification and were expelled from the SWP (although
we were willing to accept the discipline of the United
Secretariat had we been permitted to continue to fight for
our positions nationally and internationally). While the
SWP was capitulating to Castroism, while Moreno in the
1960s was fancying himself an ersatz guerrilla (before
executing a sharp turn in the 1970s and referring to
guerrillas in Argentina as the "mirror image" of the
extreme right-wing Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance),
and while the OCI for 18 years denied that any social
revolution at all had taken place in Cuba, the iSt alone
upheld the position that Cuba was a deformed workers
state and that the task of Trotskyists was to build a party
and lead a political revolution there.

Anyone interested in seriously debating these issues will
have to come to grips with the program and the political
practice represented today by the Spartacist tendency. The
politically bankrupt Parity Committee is able only to try to
seal off its members and sympathizers from this debate
through the use of slanders, lies and — where the relation of
forces permits, as in France — by physical violence against
the iSt.

for the CC of the TLD
Wolfgang Hohmann

Mullah-loving
Stallnophobia

To the Leadership Committee of the LCI [Ligue Commu-
niste Internationaliste, French representative of the Parity
Committee]:

As political organizations go, the life of the LCI
promises to be relatively brief and, by all accounts, fairly
brutal.

Banners flying, you marched out of the LCR [Ligue
Communiste Revolutionnaire, French section of the USec]
congress last October, loudly proclaiming that nothing

short of a revolutionary Trotskyist party and program was
needed in Nicaragua. You promised a new beginning for
Trotskyism in France to a couple of hundred LCR
militants who, having had it with the gross liquidationism
of Mandel, Krivine & Co., and scenting a split in the air,
had in a short period of time swollen the ranks of the LTT
[Leninist-Trotskyist Tendency of the USec]. But where is
the LCI today? It is on the side of the CIA-backed mullahs
in Afghanistan, with LCI militants confined to cell
meetings with no political life; there is no discussion,
contrary to what might have been expected given the
heterogeneous and turbulent nature of the split; they are
speculating on the date of the fusion with the [Lambertist]
OCI, not the need for it; they are campaigning for the
election of Marchais and Mitterrand — again. Like in the
LCR. Only the formulations on the petitions have changed.

From the beginning, you, the LCI leadership, have done
everything to erect a watertight barrier between leftists in
the LCI and the LTF. If there were a "Spartacist" faction in
the LCI, it would be based on a Trotskyist program and
counterposed both to the vile social-democratic Stalino-
phobia of Lambert-Nemo and the centrist tailism of the
Pabloites. It is you who have insisted that any militant in
the LCI runs the risk of being Spartacist-baited if he has
any reservations about the OCI or thinks he can fight to
correct its course — and of course if he asks too many
questions or even wants to read for himself our assessment
of his organization. You didn't like it very much when a
month after the formation of the LCI we asked the
awkward question: "Will Nemo put the Lambertist
handcuffs on the LCI? Whither the LCI?"

That our polemics touched a nerve, we can tell from your
response: physical intimidation, threats to "write us out" of
the workers movement, cop-baiting and other slanders —
Stalin-style intimidation tactics designed to stifle political
debate in the LCI. On 13 November 1979 OCI goons
attacked our salesmen in front of the Mutualite, and LCI
members were forced to condone such attacks o% be
suspected of having sympathies for the LTF. One is
reminded of an analagous tactic used, albeit on a different
level, by the Greek Stalinists, who involved new members
in assassinating Trotskyists in order to draw a bloodline.

The provocateur-baiting didn't work very well: the most
blustering of the bullies had to back down. The cynicism
behind your slanders is glaring; many of your cadre, not to
mention some of your Paris and Rouen militants, worked
for years with comrades who are now militants in the
LTF....

While the worst insinuations have died down, at least in
public, the attempts at physical intimidation continue. In
addition anyone known to have ever been close to the LTF
is denied entry into the LCI, forced to sign a compromising
confession or, once inside, hounded and denied the right to
fight for political positions not drawn entirely from [the
OCI's] Informations Ouvrieres. Truly, the LCI is rapidly
becoming a Lambertist gulag. When will the show trials
start? Even you, the leaders, are so fearful of being
influenced by the Spartacist "virus" that you won't even
handle mail from the LTF. When you returned our Tribune
Ouvriere sub, we had a good laugh. But when you returned
our press release concerning the attack against our
comrade Fred Zierenberg, we characterized you for what
you are: fearful little sectarian bureaucrats, mullah-loving
Stalinophobes

SUMMER 1980

13

As we predicted, the formally leftist position expressed
on Nicaragua, which the LTT and Moreno's Bolshevik
Faction used as a pretext to split the USec, was soon
shown to be episodic. Iran and especially Afghanistan
revealed the real politics of the leaders of the "Parity
Committee." As we said in a leaflet distributed to the
Second Congress of the LCR:

"In a grotesque caricature of their typical enthusiasm for
non-revolutionary forces, all wings of the USec (as well
as the OCl) are guilty of the criminal betrayal of
supporting the mullahs. They were all united in arguing
that Khomeini's rise to power was a victory for the workers
and they all continued to call for the defense of the Iranian
'revolution' when their own comrades were arrested and
threatened with execution. And they were all united
in denouncing the iSt's slogan 'Down with
the Shah! Down with the Mullahs!' as sectarian and
counterrevolutionary."

And sure enough, the OC and the Morenoites joined in
glorifying the spectacular diversion from the struggles of
the working masses and national minorities which the
seizure of the U.S. embassy by Khomeini-loyal "Islamic
students" represented.

Then, when the Red Army entered Afghanistan to put
down reactionary uprisings by various monarchist and
religious tribal groupings who in collaboration with the
CIA wanted to establish an "Islamic Republic" on the
borders of the Soviet Union, modeled on that of Imam
Khomeini or General Zia in Pakistan, you hurried,
together with the Morenoites and the OCI, to attack. . . the
Red Army! . . . The LTFs slogans, "Hail Red Army" and
"Extend the Gains of the October Revolution" draw the
class line in Afghanistan today. But you, who were so
proud of your opposition to boycotting the Moscow
Games when you wercLin the LCR, you jump back into line
when Lambert snaps his fingers and you now refuse to
defend the gains of the October Revolution at a time when
imperialist threats against the Soviet Union are on the rise.

The OCI's line on Afghanistan represents the latest
counterrevolutionary expression of its Stalinophobia:
anyone, even the reactionary mullahs, who opposes the
Stahnists must have something going for them. This is the
same Stalinophobic method that the LTT and the OCI
applied to Portugal in the summer of 1975, solidarizing
with the SP [Socialist Party]-led, CIA-backed "mass mo-
bilizations" which were attacking and burning Commu-
nist Party headquarters. At the time the Morenoites
pretended to a left oppositional stance in the USec; now
they take up the anti-Soviet cause in Afghanistan, befitting
their identification with Third-Worldist nationalists even
in their most reactionary forms.

Today, these Stalinophobic tinpot bureaucrats say they
are setting up a conference supposedly open "to all

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Trotskyist organizations." Of course we understand that
the OCI and its agents in the LCI leadership reserve for
themselves the right to pass judgement on who can or
cannot lay claim to being Trotskyist. We challenge the
Parity Committee to admit us as observers to their "open
conference." Let us see who can justifiably lay claim to
Leninist principles and Trotskyist clarity in the light of
their political past

Who Are the Real Trotskyists?

Since its inception the Spartacist tendency has
maintained that the Fourth International was destroyed in
1951-53 by Pabloite revisionism. The goal of the LTF and
the iSt is not to throw itself into a series of unprincipled
maneuvers based on the idea that there is a "family" of
Trotskyism, reshuffling and patching together currently
existing organizations with counterposed and incompati-
ble political positions. All that would remain is to rebaptize
this bastard product the "reconstructed" or "reorganized"
Fourth International. Our fight is to reforge the democrati-
cally centralized world party of revolution. Our struggle for
an authentic Trotskyist tendency united by program and
governed by international democratic centralism is the
complete opposite of your unprincipled "combination-
ism": that is why you are forced to attack us, sometimes in
hilariously self-contradictory fashion. Thus in the space of
a week you ludicrously tried to amalgamate us with the
highly dubious Michel Varga by saying that we claimed "to
be" the Fourth International (interview with Nemo,
Informations Ouvrieres, 17-24 November [1979]), then
turned around and attacked us for our real position:
fighting for the rebirth of the Fourth International
(Tribune Ouvriere, 24 November [1979]). In the course of
two decades of struggle to reforge the Fourth Internation-
al, our tendency has grown from a nucleus in North
America into an international current which must be
reckoned with by all those who pay lip service to
Trotskyism. We have regrouped many subjectively
revolutionary militants from the United Secretariat. And
we did it not by adapting our politics to form rotten blocs
which are as unstable as they are unprincipled, but by
remaining faithful to the Trotskyist program which is
borne out evefy day in life, from Cuba to Afghanistan. If
the Parity Committee were what it claims to be, it would
have a burning interest in debating the positions of the
iSt — if only to prove us wrong. We know that the OCI, the
LCI and the Parity Committee will do everything in their
power to make any real discussion impossible during its
"open conference" — if there ever is such a conference. But
just as Trotsky did not give up his struggle to win over
subjectively revolutionary elements from the Stalinist
parties, we will not abandon the militants of the LCI to the
bureaucratic handcuffs of Nemo, Just and Lambert.

20 March 1980

for the LTF,

— Thimbault (LCR, 1966-76, Rouen City Executive)
— Lesueur (LCR, 1967-74, Central Committee)
—Cochise (LCR, 1968-76, Renault-Cleon, CGT)
— Antoine (LCR, 1968-75, Societe Generale)
—Igor (LCR, 1971-74, Societe Generale, CGT, CFDT)
— Daru (LCR, 1972-76, ElbeuQ
— Hamid (LCR, 1972-77, SNCF, Rouen)
—Clement (LCR, 1973-76, Elbeuf)

14

SPARTACIST

Lamentable Liaison Committee

The Anti-Spartacists

The following was originally published as a supplement (23
May) of Le Bolchevik, organ of the Ligue Trotskyste de
France.

Ernest Mandel's parody of Trotskyism — the "United
Secretariat of the Fourth International" (USec), whose
components have found themselves on opposite sides of the
barricades from Portugal 1975 to Afghanistan 1980 —
seems to be producing rotten-bloc images of itself through
cloning. First, in a spectacular split last fall over the pretext
of Nicaragua, it gave birth to the "Parity Committee for the
Reorganization (Reconstruction) of the Fourth Interna-
.tional," an alliance of French crypto-social democrat
Pierre Lambert and Argentine would-be caudillo Nahuel
Moreno that is every bit as unprincipled as the United
Secretariat. Now the Parity Committee has generated its
own replica in miniature, the "Trotskyist International
Liaison Committee (for the Reconstruction of the Fourth
International)." The three giants of this micro-USec are the
Workers Socialist League (WSL) of Britain, the Gruppo
Bolscevico-Leninista (GBL) of Italy and the Chilean Liga
Obrera Bolchevique (LOB).

For a time it looked as if Lambert/ Moreno would attract
the flotsam and jetsam thrown off by previous outburts of
factionalism in the USec. Their talk of an independent
Trotskyist party in Nicaragua and defense of leftists from
Sandinista repression gave them a militant image. But
when Afghanistan tore off this cover to reveal the deep
underlying Stalinophobia — calling for miliary support to
anti-Soviet Islamic reactionary^guerrillas — the wavering
centrists got cold feet. Roberto Massari's Revolutionary
Marxist Faction, after seeking and being refused atten-
dance at Mandel &. Co.'s "Eleventh World Congress,"
retaliated by publishing voluminous correspondence
showing how it unsuccessfully tried to crawl back into the
USec and declared itself independent. Guillermo Lora's
Fourth Internationalist Tendency called down a "plague
on both your houses," finding the USec split of no interest
in its struggle to form an "anti-imperialist front" with the
Latin American "national" bourgeoisie. And the WSL/
GBL/ LOB founded a home for the Orphan Annies of
pseudo-Trotskyism.

Conceived in opportunism, born of a marriage of
convenience, the Liaison Committee has only one reason
for being: anti-Spartacism. It set as its goal "to drive out all
forms of revisionism from within the Fourth International"
(which one — the USec, Parity Committee, Healyites,
Posadistas or Vargaites?). Thus behind its anti-Pabloist
rhetoric is the bankrupt conception of a "family of
Trotskyism." The first public statement of the new
grouping declared, "After political agreement has been
reached on strategic principles and fundamental attacks,
the Liaison Committee intends to form itself into a
democratic-centralist international Faction" {Socialist
Press, 13 February 1980). Thereby the WSL/GBL/LOB
admit that their bloc is based on neither democratic

centralism nor agreement on strategic principles. But if
after two years of cohabitation their goal is not achieved,
the high contracting parties agree in advance to separate.

In the meantime, the Liaison Committee's lack of basic
programmatic agreement has not stopped it from publish-
ing a series of leaflets on current events from Afghanistan
to Peru. Its Afghanistan flyer "condemn[s] the intervention
of the Soviet troops" but also warns that "a withdrawal of
Soviet troops from Afghanistan. . . would also give a major
boost to the policies of imperialism." This is about as clear
as a barrel of tar. But as soon as the bourgeois press
bemoaned the suppression of a shopkeepers' "strike" in the
Kabul bazaar, the WSL solidarized with the "masses"
against the Soviet army. With this position (some abstract
verbiage about defense of the USSR notwithstanding), it's
a toss-up whether the authors belong in the muddled USec
or the anti-Soviet Parity Committee. Clearly, though, they
flee from the hard Trotskyist line of the international
Spartacist tendency (iSt) which proclaimed "Hail Red
Army!" against Afghan reaction.

The Liaison Committee wants to inhabit more or less the
same niche on the USec's left flank, occupied in 1976-77 by
the short-lived "Necessary International Initiative." Hop-
ing that their lash-up can help swing a deal with the "big-
time" revisionists of the Parity Committee or USec, once
again the bloc partners take their sweet time in facing up to
fundamental programmatic differences. This time, even
more than before, it is an Anti-Spartacist League. Each of
the component groups has been centrally defined through
confrontation with the iSt. And their rejection of a
consistent Trotskyist policy has been sealed with betrayals.
The Liaison Committee is the combination of an Italian
group that called for votes to the "Historic Compromise"
of repression, austerity and clerical domination; a Chilean
group which calls for votes to the key popular front of
recent times, Allendf's Unidad Popular, even after its
bloody demise; and an English group whose principal
leader is notorious for scabbing!

WSL: Scabbing

Let's dissect this Anti-Spartacist League par excellence.
The Liaison Committee was formed at a conference of the
British Workers Socialist League in late December. But
this came only after the WSL had been given the cold
shoulder by-both the USec and the Parity Committee, all in
the space of six months. In August a draft agreement had
been reached stating that despite "substantial differences,"
there was "the objective possibility of the WSL fusing with
the USFI [USec]." This became a dead letter only when the
USec backed out. Then the WSL resumed its on-again, off-
again flirtation with the Morenoites and Lambertists,
"welcoming" their initiative and formally applying to join
the Parity Committee. However, Moreno/ Lambert raised
as a condition for entry that the WSL refer to them as
"Trotskyists." Thereupon Socialist Press (19 December

SUMMER 1980

15

1979) complained that "It begins to look as if the
[Parity Committee] conference may not be as 'open' as it
appeared...."

The WSL's relationship to the international Spartacist
tendency is strictly involuntary: the WSL continues to
produce and oxpel factions which solidarize with the
program of the iSt. First there was the Trotskyist Faction
(TF), which walked out with a fifth of the WSL's active
membership, including two national committee members,
three editorial board members, several regional and local
organizers and two-thirds of the commission appointed to
draft a reply to an iSt letter of June 1976. The fusion of the
Trotskyist Faction with the London Spartacist Group gave
birth to the Spartacist League/ Britain in March 1978. In
early 1980 this was followed by the Leninist Faction (LF),
expelled with three more of the WSL's NCers, two more
editorial board members, the head of the WSL youth group
and the co-author of the main document against the TF. As
a parting shot, the LF warned the WSL leadership to be
on the lookout for a "Sverdlov Faction" and fused with the
SL/B in early May.

The WSL bases its claims to Trotskyist orthodoxy on a
document, "The Poisoned Well" (based on a quote by the
American SWP's Jack Barnes!), which presents its analysis
of the development of Pabloist revisionism after World
War II. This documents claims that Pabloism is simply an
empirical method {shsidcs of Healy), rather than a program
rejecting the basic tenets of Trotskyism, and locates its
origins in "middle class and intellectual forces with little
experience and few links to the working class." The WSL
finds evidence of this method everywhere since World War
II, thus ignoring its quintessential expression: the destruc-
tion of the Fourth International in 1951-53 as a result of
Pablo's liquidationism. Not once does it mention the
Spartacist tendency's nearly 20-year struggle for a
consistent Trotskyist program, even when discussing the
Cuban deformed workers state, where the iSt's contribu-
tion is inescapable for honest Marxists. The WSL seeks not
to destroy those who have betrayed the banner of
Trotskyism but to pressure or "educate" the Mandels,
Lamberts and Morenos.

But most of all, this workerist document tries to provide
a justification for the syndicalist practice of WSL leader
Alan Thomett. Originating as a right split from Healyism,
the Thornett tendency has always been nationally centered
with the faintest hint of internationalism. And its left-
Labourite trade unionism has led it to condone and even
engage in scabbing as it tails after the backstabbing union
bureaucrats, first in a national engineering strike and most
recently in the bitter 12-week British steel strike.

GBL: Historic Compromise

The Italian Gruppo Bolscevico-Leninista, in contrast to
Thornett's WSL, has been an ardent suitor of the iSt. The
GBL was thrown out of the Lambertist OCRFI in 1975 for
refusing to go along with Lambert's hysterical slander
campaign labeling the highly dubious Michel Varga a CIA
agent. That same year the GBL authored a document,
"Theses on the Crisis of the Fourth International (Draft),"
stating that of the forces claiming to be Trotskyist there was
"an orthodox left wing, whose main component is the iSt."
It added, "The 'Statement of Principles' of the Spartacist
League (1966) may be taken as the basis for the

Spartacist Britain

Workers Socialist League leader Alan Thornett. He
scabbed on engineering and steel workers strikes.

international regroupment of orthodox Trotskyism."
More than two years of discussions ensued during which
the GBL argued that despite sharp differences on two of the
most controversial questions facing the left, it was
principled for it to join the iSt as a faction. We replied that
the goal of Trotskyists was not to build a phony
"international," a mini-USec, that would fall apart at the
first real test of the class struggle.

"Notoriously," wrote the GBL, "your organization holds
the strange opinion that electoral support to a workers
party involved or implicated in a Popular Front, or
inclined toward it, equals capitulation to the Popular Front
itself" (// Militante, October 1976). According to the GBL,
this "strange opinion" — our proletarian opposition to
class-collaborationist coalitions — indicated a "sectarian
attitude toward the mass movement." So since the masses
consider the popular frofit their own, these "Trotskyists"
tail along rather than patiently explain that this bourgeois
formation is a deadly enemy of the workers movement.
And we are not talking about just any old popular front but
fenrico Berlinguer's "Historic Compromise" with Christian
Democracy — the popular front in a priest's cassock which
meant anti-working-class austerity, "strong state" witch-
hunting against the far left, opposition to abortion and
divorce, and support to NATO against the Soviet Union!
So intent was the GBL in avoiding "sectarianism" toward
the "mass movement" (read, the Eurocommunist PCI) that
it insisted on voting for the Communist Party against the'
far-left Democrazia Proletaria slate. (The iSt also refused
to support the latter, but for opposite reasons, because the
DP simply wanted to pressure the PCI into a more left-
wing, Chilean-style popular front.)

On the national question the GBL accused the iSt of
feeling "the pressures of the Bronx" (i.e., capitulating to
pro-Zionist imperialist public opinion) for refusing to
support the Arab colonels and sheiks against Zionist Israel
in the 1967 and 1973 Near East wars and for refusing to

continued on next page

16

SPARTACIST

Italian Communist
Party (PCI)
demonstration.
Italian Gruppo
Bolscevico-
Leninista called for
vote to PCI of
"Historic

Compromise" with
papacy, austerity,
repression and
NATO.

take sides in the 1974-76 communal war in Lebanon.
Claiming that the Muslim side was really a popular front,
the GBL declared that the massacre of the Christian village
of Damur (in response to a massacre of the Muslim district
of Qarantina in Beirut) had "no value from the Marxist
viewpoint" ("First Balance Sheet of Discussions Between
the iSt and GBL"). Well, in our modest view, Marxism is
opposed to genocide. In the face of the GBL's critical
support to the popular front and apology for communal
violence, the iSt responded in a letter of 18 April 1977:
"As we have repeatedly pointed out to you, the iSt seeks
principled regroupments and a cohesive (though certainly
not monolithic) international tendency based on program-
matic confluence. You are already aware that your
positions on voting for reformist workers parties in
popular front formations and on support to petty-
bourgeois nationalist movements (such as in Lebanon and
Angola) are considered by us to preclude such a principled
fusion at this point. Your refusal to recognize this fact
appears to indicate a serious difference on the organization
question as well."

LOB: Voting for Allende

UnUke the WSL and GBL, the third group in the Liaison
Committee bloc, the Chilean Liga Obrera Bolchevique,
makes no pretense of internationalism. As the vehicle of a
union caudillo, the LOB's only real claim to fame is to
distribute in Europe a newspaper allegedly "coming from
the interior" of Pinochet's bloody dictatorship. In exile its
main activity is participating (along with the rest of the
Chilean' Trotskyoid groups) in a low-level propaganda
bloc, the Committee for the Defense of Trade Union and
Human Rights (CODESH), that is the likely starting point
for a "far left" popular front. As for the LOB's lider
mdximo, he arrived in Europe in the fall of 1976 as the
result of an international campaign waged by the Partisan
Defense Committee and the iSt to rescue him from the
bloody Videla junta in Argentina, where he had fled after
the September 1973 Santiago coup. Unable to break from
his syndicalist and viscerally anti-Leninist political origins.

he consequently parted ways with the Chilean Organi-
zacion Trotskista Revolucionaria in mid-1977 as the OTR
was joining the Spartacist tendency.

But the LOB has clearly stated its position on one
question that was a main difference with the iSt: voting for
Allende. Although terming the UP a "classical popular
front," it emphatically insisted "revolutionaries could not
remain aloof from the struggles waged by the proletariat to
impose Allende as president." Thus, it was necessary to
"convert the vote for Allende into a vote against the
popular front" {Alternativa Proletaria, June 1978). That
would be a neat trick indeed, seeing as the "comrade
president" was the single candidate of the popular front!

The Spartacist tendency was unique in warning from
the beginning that the "people's government" of the UP
was a capitalist government, a roadblock that would have
to be swept aside by revolutionary mobilization of the
workers if a bloodbath were to be avoided. In contrast, the
LOB "could not remain aloof" from the masses' illusions
and, while muttering a few criticisms of the "limitations"
of the UP, says it was necessary to tag along with Allende
while reaction was rearming, preparing the bloody debacle.
And that was in 1978, only a year after separating from the
OTR. More recently the LOB signed a joint political
declaration with the Izquierda Socialista (Socialist Left —
ex-Dissident Faction of the MIR) which ignores the
character of the UP altogether and raises "the slogan of a
sovereign constituent assembly as centralizing the activities
of the workers and people's movement" {Lucha Socialista,
February 1979). So while the iSt calls for workers
revolution to bring down the junta, the LOB/IS put
forward a purely "democratic" program, leaving the door
open for a political bloc with anti-Pinochet bourgeois
forces.

Nine Points

The "Trotskyist International iJiaison Committee" is a
collection of cast-offs who are defined by their abject

SUMMER 1980

17

willingness to compromise Marxist principles out of fear of
isolation from the masses and by their hatred of the
Spartacist tendency. There is a clear note of desperation in
the pleas by the GBL and WSL to be allowed into an
international — any international — and program be
damned, so long as they can "discuss." (The LOB could
care less.) If there is a "family" of renegades from
Trotskyism, these are certainly the poor relations. And the
Liaison Committee clearly is going nowhere, for with their
politics there is no principled reason why the various
components should not end up with the USec or Parity
Committee. As a measure of the difference between this
small-time Menshevism and the Bolshevism of the iSt, one
need only contrast the nine-point "programmatic" docu-
ment adopted at the first meeting of the Liaison Committee
with a nine-point platform raised three years ago by the
Spartacist tendency as a potential basis for revolutionary
regroupment with dissidents breaking to the left from the
reformist and centrist USec leaderships. -

The only hard line drawn in the document put forward
by the GBL was against the iSt (declared, in the first
paragraph, "to be considered as irreparably lost for
orthodox Trotskyism"). For the rest, it is a collection of
homilies and generalities about destroying capitalist
society, the crucial importance of democratic tasks in
"oppressed countries" and the need for "an international
organization" based on "the Marxism of the present
epoch." (And what is that, a reader might ask.
"Bolshevism-Leninism" says the document, adding in
parentheses — why not a footnote? — that this is Trotsky-
ism.) In contast the draft declaration by Trotskyists
expelled or driven out of the USec who now adhere to the
Spartacist tendency called for:

■ No political or electoral support to popular fronts; for
conditional opposition to workers parties in open or
implicit class-collaborationist coalitions;

■ Uphold the Trotskyist theory of permanent revolution;
for proletarian leadership of the national/social struggle;

■ For military support to petty-bourgeois nationalist
forces fighting imperialism, but absolutely no political
support to such forces; for Trotskyist parties in every
country;

■ Against violence within the workers movement;

■ For unconditional defense of all the deformed/
degenerated workers states against imperialism; for
political revolution against the bureaucracies; no

Gamma

Even with hindsight, Chilean Liga Obrera Bol-
chevique would vote for Allende's Unidad Popular,
which paved way for Pinochet's white terror.

political support to competing Stalini^ cliqu.es and
factions;

■ For communist fractions in the unions, based on the
Transitional Program;

■ For the communist tactic of the united front from above;
for the tactic of regroupment to unite subjective
revolutionaries in the vanguard party; for intransigent
exposure of centrism;

■ Rejection of the claims of ostensibly Trotskyist
Internationals to speak for the Fourth International,
destroyed by Pabloism in 1951-53;

■ For the reforging of a democratic-centralist Fourth
International which will stop at nothing short of the
dictatorship of the proletariat.

These points constitute a program which was tested in'
Chile and Portugal, one which uniquely armed .the
Spartacist tendency to confront the rise of clerical reaction
in Iran, when the rest of the left was bowing to Khomeini.
This program prepared the iSt to stand at its post in the
onset of a new Cold War while many ostensibly Trotskyist
groups were tailing Carter's anti-Soviet«"HumarT Rights"
crusade and siding with CIA-backed mullahs in Afghani-
stan. This is a program to lead the proletariatlo power, not
for making slimy d'eals with Mandel! Break with all the
centrist and reformist attempts, to tinker with -the
Trotskyist program! Join the iSt in the struggle for the
rebirth of the Fourth International, to build "a granite hard
world communist party the way Lenin and Trotsky did! ■

Leninist Faction Bulletin

From Centrism
to Trotskyism

Documents of the
Expelled Leninist
Faction of the WSL

Price: 75p
Order from:

Spartacist Publications,
P.O. Box 185

London, England WC1H HJE

18

SPART/fclST

Leninist Faction-SL/B
Declaration of Fusion

REPRINTED FROM
SPARTACIST BRiTkiN, MA Y 1980

1 . The Spartacist League (SL), British section of the
international Spartacist tendency (iSt), and the Leninist
Faction, formerly of the Workers Socialist League (WSL),
have fused on the basis of the decisions of the first four
Congresses of the Comintern, the Founding Conference of
the Fourth International, the Declaration of Principles of
the SL/US, the nine points for international Trotskyist
regroupment of the iSt, and the LF document, 'The Fight
for the Proletarian Programme." This fusion represents an
important acquisition of cadre and strengthens the iSt's
fight to forge the Leninist vanguard internationally. That
LF cadres were among the most bitter opponents of the
Trotskyist Faction (TF) which split from the WSL in 1979
to fuse with the London Spartacist Group ahd form the SL,
is a powerful vindication of the Spartacist tendency's fight
to polarise opponent organisations by hard programmatic
combat on the key issues of the class struggle, and achieve
qualitative growth through a process of splits and fusions.
The ability of the SL to win these cadres must also be
contrasted to the failure of our centrist opponents — such as
Workers Power and the International-Communist
League — to even respond seriously to the LFs approaches
for discussions followings its expulsion from the WSL.

2. The Left Tendency (LT) — forerunner of the LF — was
formed in May 1979 in opposition to the ever more
rightward drift of the WSL, on the basis that a democratic-
centralist internafional Trotskyist tendency must be built
on clear programmatic agreement. It sought a road to
international regroupment quite alien to the unprincipled
lash-ups seen in Mandel's United Secretariat, Lambert and
Moreno's Parity Committee, and today in the WSL's
efforts to form an international pressure group on the
larger fake-Trotskyist blocs — and a counterweight to the
iSt — through its wretched Liaison Committee. Yet the LT
was a left centrist grouping because it had no consistent
revolutionary programmatic alternative to the WSL
leadership.

It maintained an antipathy to the Trotskyism of the iSt,
both on certain key programmatic questions, and in failing
to understand the need for a fighting propaganda
perspective in the struggle to reforge the Fourth Interna-
tional through the tactic of revolutionary regroupment. LT
comrades, trained in the fake "mass work" methods ofthe
WSL, only found their way towards the iSt's programme in
the course of the factional struggle itself. Particularly in
fighting the WSL's lumping together of Khomeini's Islamic
reaction in Iran with the anti-Somoza upsurge in
Nicaragua under the rubric of the "forward movement of
the working class," and in the struggle against Alan
Thornett's scabbing during the national engineering
strikes, the LT comrades were forced to confront and
recognise the unique correctness of iSt positions as varied

as proletarian opposition to Islamic reaction, the role of
petty-bourgeois guerrillaism and the creation of deformed
workers states, and how the picket line is the class line and
means don't cross.

3. It was after such experiences and subsequent re-
examination of the iSt programme on such critical
questions of proletarian class strategy as unconditional
opposition to popular fronts, the application of the
Leninist position on the national question to Ireland, and
the revolutionary struggle against Labourism, that the LF
was formed. It was a faction equipped with the basic
elements of a programmatic critique of the WSL, and an
understanding that the struggle to consolidate a Leninist
vanguard involves centrally the fight to remove the centrist
and reformist obstacles in its path by head-on program-
matic combat. The transition from the LT to the LF was
consequently not simply a question of reaching abstract
agreement with a revolutionary programme. It was the
beginning of the LF comrades' opportunity to learn
concretely the meaning of Leninist functioning — a mode of
functioning antithetical to the Menshevik and semi-
Healyite methods in which they had been previously
trained. The fight for the Leninist conception of the party
took place not only against the WSL but within the LF
itself. The fight against one LF member — who, unwilling to
face a sharp political struggle against the WSL and
harbouring principled disagreements with the LF beneath
a guise of votes for its political positions, rapidly responded
by defection — was an important step towards consolida-
fion of the faction.

4. In the period since the LFs bureaucratic expulsion
from the WSL further programmatic discussion and joint
work — particularly in the steel strike and in interventions
against opponents on the issue of Afghanistan and the
defence of the USSR— have prepared the ground for a
deep-going fusion. The attendance and participation of LF
members in SL internal meetings, and vice versa, has been
valuable preparation for the task of forging a collective
leadership in the fused organisation — evidenced in the fact
that disputed questions were not debated simply along the
old organisational lines. This was the case in the
discussions on the need to break with elements of
libertarianism in the LF's past organisational methods, on
the fight for Bolshevik membership standards (which led to
the dropping of one young member), and the many
discussions on the precise content of and tactics for a
communist propaganda intervention into the steel strike.

The challenge now confronting the SL is to integrate
these new leading cadre in the process of forging a
collective leadership. The accumulation of experienced
cadres from our opponents will always be central to our
further development and consolidation. Our success in
Britain has so far largely been in winning forces from the
WSL — since its formal "orthodox Trotskyism" and "anti-
Pabloism" have left little choice for active left opposition-
ists but to seriously consider the authentically Trotskyist
struggle of the iSt against centrist and reformist liquida-
tionism. But the SL now goes forward strengthened,
confident in the knowledge that oppositions in other
opponent tendencies will in the future follow the road of
the LF.

Forward to a British Trotskyist Party, Section of the
Reforged Fourth International!

SUMMER 1980 [ 19

20

SPARTACIST

Publications of tlie international
Spartacist tendency

Workers Vanguard

Biweekly organ of the Spartacist League/U.S.

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Monthly organ of the Spartacist League ibf Australia
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SUMMER 1980

21

Afghanistan and the Left...

(continued from page 4)

government couldn't supply it, the peasants were economi-
cally worse off than before.

In general the regime made no effort to neutralize its
numerous social enemies by moderating the pace of
reforms while simultaneously broadening its own base
(e.g., sending large numbers of youth to study in the USSR,
rapidly expanding the urban proletariat). At the same time,
murderous cliquism, especially by Amin, eliminated much
of the PDPA's original following. An ever smaller group of
modernizing intellectuals was tending to be pitted against
the mass of the people. The Taraki/Amin regime can thus
be convicted of a large dose of Utopian adventurism,
seeking to drag Afghanistan into the twentieth century by
purely military means, moreover, a military means it did
not possess.

As the insurgency grew the army was riddled with
desertions and mutinies, and the PDPA regime became
ever more dependent on Soviet military support. By the
summer of 1979 Amin commanded some 5,000 Soviet
military c^dre; they manned the sophisticated weaponry,
especially flying combat aircraft. Without these Soviet
forces it is more than possible the Kabul radical
government would have fallen before the
counterrevolution.

Those self-styled "Marxists" like Tariq Ali, who now
maintain that the Afghan left-nationalists and feudalist
reactionaries should be allowed to fight it out free of
foreign interference, should logically have demanded the
withdrawal of Soviet troops well before the December
coup. Here Khomeini and Brzezinski were, as usual, more
consistent than their present left tailists. Last June the
ayatollah read the riot act to the Soviet ambassador over
his country's intervention in "Islamic" Afghanistan. A
month later Carter's spiritual adviser Brzezinski de-
nounced the Soviets for trying "to impose alien doctrines
on deeply religious and nationally conscious peoples"
([London] Guardian, 6 August 1979).

There has been speculation in both the bourgeois and left
press that the Soviets overthrew Amin because he was a
"national communist," a budding Afghan Tito. Even
leaving aside that he ruled through a section of the old
bourgeois officer corps, this notion is utter nonsense. The
Soviet presence in Afghanistan expanded precisely with the
accession of Amin as premier in the spring of 1979, as he
opted for a purely military solution to the rightist
insurgency. Conversely, the Kremlin advocated slowing
down the pace of reforms in order to minimize the need for
direct Soviet military support to the petty-bourgeois
radicals in Kabul. Amin evidently believed that however
much trouble he got into with the counterrevolution, the
Russians would be forced to bail him out.

And in a sense they did, though not exactly in the way he
had expected. Here we have one of those ironies of history
so appreciated by the late Isaac Deutscher. One wonders if
the shade of Hafizullah Amin appreciates that in the end he
won, though it cost him his own life. He provoked a
situation in which the Soviets intervened with sufficient
force to crush the reactionary insurgency and therefore
with sufficient force to impose a social revolution on

backward, mullah-ridden Afghanistan.

Extend the Social Gains of the October
Revolution!

Khomeini and Brzezinski to the contrary, Taraki/
Amin's Afghanistan was not a Soviet Communist satellite,
i.e., a deformed workers state. It was an unstable petty-
bourgeois nationalist regime ruling through a shaky
remnant of the old army. Facing a seemingly unwinnable
civil war, a section of the PDPA might have tried to
extricate itself by turning sharply to the right, expelling the
Russians and making a deal with the Western imperialists
for their backing against the rebels. From what we know of
the ruthless, power-mad Amin, he was capable of
emulating Chiang Kai-shek in 1927 or Anwar Sadat in
1972.

With its massive intervention in late December, the
Soviet armed forces became the dominant power in
Afghanistan, whose present fate will be decided in
Moscow, not Kabul. Of course, the conservative bureau-
crats in the Kremlin did not send 100,000 troops into
Afghanistan to effect a social revolution, but simply to
make secure an unstable, strategically-placed client state.
No doubt Brezhnev & Co. would prefer a friendly
bourgeois state like Finland. But Afghanistan is not
Finland. There is no way that country can sustain anything
remotely like a stable bourgeois democracy. In any case,
the rightist insurgents and their imperialist backers are
intransigent against any coalition government the Russians
would accept. It is possible the Kremlin could do a deal
with the imperialists to withdraw, for example, in return
for NATO's reversing its decision to deploy hundreds of
new nuclear missiles in West Europe. That would be a real
counterrevolutionary crime against the Afghan peoples.

More likely is the Soviet army's prolonged occupation of
Afghanistan and with it the possibility of its
transformation along the lines of Soviet Central Asia or
Mongolia. Social revolutionary measures (e.g., land to the
tiller) would be necessary to erode and win over the poor
peasant supporters of the reactionary insurgency. Only
those leftists poisoned by bourgeois-nationalist ideology
could deny that such a social revolution, although imposed
from without and bureaucratically deformed, would have
an enormously liberating effect for the Afghan masses.
Even the New York Times admits that Soviet Central
Asians regard their country's military intervention in
Afghanistan as support for the liberation of their
backward, oppressed neighbors. (See "Soviet Central
Asians Back Afghan Intervention," Workers Vanguard
No. 254, 18 April.)

The difference between Soviet Central Asia and
Afghanistan is to be measured not in decades but in
centuries. While Afghanistan is over 90 percent illiterate,
neighboring Soviet Uzbekistan probably has a higher
literacy rate than Jimmy Carter's Georgia. The average life
expectancy in Uzbekistan is 70 compared to 40 in
Afghanistan. A major reason for this is that in Uzbekistan
there is one doctor for every 380 people and in Afghanistan
one doctor for every 20,000! All social and economic
comparisons show the same thing.

Marx and Engels, following the French Utopian socialist
continued on next page

22

SPARTACIST

Charles Fourier, maintained that "in any given society the
degree of women's emancipation is the natural measure of
the general emancipation." The status of women in Soviet
Central Asia is not only higher than in any Islamic
bourgeois country (let alone Afghanistan), but in some
areas (e.g., representation in the government) compares
favorably even with the advanced bourgeois democracies.
For example, 18 percent of all judges and 45 percent of all
legislative members from the village level up in Uzbekistan
are women.

To be sure, the workers and peasants of Soviet Central
Asia suffer the same inequalities and bureaucratic
oppression as their class brothers and sisters in Great
Russia. There is some pressure for Russification in
Uzbekistan, Tadzhikistan, Khirgizia, etc. and, of course,
the Moscow Stalinist regime denies all nationalities the
democratic right of self-determination, i.e., the right to
secede and form a separate state. Should, Afghanistan be
transformed into a Soviet-satellite deformed workers state,
it is possible a future revolutionary crisis could find the
Afghan workers and peasants battling against a Soviet
army under command of the Kremlin Stalinist bureaucra-
cy. And in general proletarian political revolution within
the Soviet bloc will be interwoven with the struggle for the
right of national self-determination and other democratic
rights and freedoms. But to raise the banner of "national
self-determination" for Afghanistan today is to provide a
democratic cover for imperialist-backed social counterrev-
olution of the most brutal, barbaric kind.

Revolution, Counterrevolution and National
Self-Determination

"Russia has violated the national sovereignty of
Afghanistan," scream the U.S. imperialists, the Peking
Stalinists, the Eurocommunists. And this cry is duly
echoed by the Mike Klonskys, Tony Cliffs and Tariq Alis.
This charge doesn't even hold up on its own terms.
Afghanistan is not a nation but a feudal-derived state

comprising a mosaic of nationalities, ethnic and tribal
groupings. The Afghan monarchy was consolidated in the
late nineteenth century over myriad unrelated peoples as a
buffer state between tsarist Russia and British India. Much
of the rural population has never lived under the effective
control, of any central state power, but identifies exclusively
with particular ethnic, tribal or linguistic groups.

Imperialist trouble-shooters to the rightist insurgents
lament that the Pashtoon, Hazara, Tadzhik, etc. guerrillas
hate one another as much as they do the Soviet-backed
Kabul radicals. Should the counterrevolutionary forces
win, there would likely follow another civil war, this time
fought along ethnic lines. In fact, if Soviet Central Asia is
taken as a guide, the ethnic minorities of Afghanistan
would enjoy more genuine national rights in a Soviet-bloc
satellite than under a Pashtoon reactionary regime.

At a more fundamental political level, however, all this is
beside the point. Even if Afghanistan were a homogeneous
nation, revolutionary Marxists would support the Soviet
Union's armed intervention. Both before and after the
December coup, all talk of Afghan "national sovereignty"
was but a cover for defending the class and caste privileges
of the landlords, moneylenders and mullahs, privileges
threatened by the Kabul petty-bourgeois radical govern-
ment. For the imperialists, such slogans were mainly
designed to bolster popular support for a renewed
onslaught against Communist Russia. For revolutionary
Marxists, the furthering of social revolution, including
defense of the USSR against capitalist-imperialism, stands
higher than the bourgeois-democratic right of national self-
determination.

Seeking to justify their enthusiastic support to the Carter
Doctrine, some Maoists, like Carl Davidson, have turned
Lenin into a national-liberal, who supposedly opposed in
principle military interventions to support revolutions in
other countries. As against this Stalinist claptrap, even
before the Bolshevik Revolution Lenin maintained that a
victorious workers government was duty-bound not only

SUMMER 1980

23

to agitate for proletarian revolution in capitalist countries,
but, when necessary, to support it with force of arms:

"After expropriating the capitalists and organising their
own socialist production, the victorious proletariat of that
country will arise against the rest of the world — the
capitalist world — attracting to its cause the oppressed
classes of other countries, stirring uprisings in those
countries against the capitalists, and in case of need using
even armed force against the exploiting classes and their
states." [emphasis in original]

— "On the Slogan for a United States of Europe"
(1915), Collected Works Vol. 21 (1964)

When a civil war is raging, a liberal attitude raising
national self-determination to the ultimate principle can
become downright criminal. Consider Hungary in 1919. In
good part due to its own errors, the Soviet regime of Bela
Kun alienated probably a majority of Hungary's peasantry
and national minorities. The passive opposition of the
petty-bourgeois masses to the Budapest-based workers
government contributed to the victory of Admiral Horthy's
white army, backed by the imperialists, and with it the
extermination of the revolutionary proletarian vanguard.

During the four and a half months of Soviet Hungary's
existence, the Russian Bolsheviks did everything in their
power to link up with it militarily. In late April Lenin
personally ordered the commanders of the Ukranian Red
Army: "The advance into part of Galicia and Bukovina is
essential for contact with Soviet Hungary. This task must
be achieved more quickly and surely" {Collected Works,
Vol. 44). But the military campaign did not succeed, to the
great misfortune of the socialist cause. In late July, just
before the end, Lenin had to inform Bela Kun:

"We are aware of Hungary's grave and dangerous
situation and are doing all we can. But speedy assistance is
sometimes physically impossible. Try to hold out as long
as you can."
—Ibid.

Had the Ukranian Red Army managed to save the
Hungarian Soviet Republic, imperialist spokesmen and
social-democrats throughout the world would have
denounced "Soviet Russian imperialism" for trampling on
the national independence of the Hungarian people. No
doubt there would even have been analogies with tsarist
Russia's occupation of Hungary during the revolutions of
1848.

The Democratic Republic of Afghanistan was not, like
the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, a proletarian
dictatorship (the Afghan proletariat being minute).
Nonetheless, the civil war in Afghanistan was a social
struggle which pitted a modernizing intelligentsia against
feudalist reaction. Here it is significant that a number of left
groups (e.g., the soft Maoid Guardian and various
Shachtmanite sectlets in the U.S.) supported the PDPA
regime against the rightist rebels, but then condemned the
Soviet intervention and demanded the Red Army with-
draw. When a left-nationalist bourgeois government is
fighting reaction, these self-styled "Marxists" can support
it. But when there is actually a possibility that feudal-
capitalist property relations will be overthrown, when the
power of the mullahs can in fact be broken, when women
can be liberated from the veil — then these petty-bourgeois
radicals are against it. For these dregs of the pro-nationalist
New Left and the wretched "Third Camp" social

democrats, counterrevolution from within is preferable to
revolution from without!

The Bitter Fruits of New Leftism

A decade ago it was the first principle, almost a truism,
for every young radical that U.S. imperialism was the truly
monstrous main enemy of the world's peoples. Yet today
the remnants of the New Left "anti-imperialists" of the
1960s, now largely one or another variety of Maoist, have
reunited with American imperialism against "Soviet
aggression." How has this come about?

During the early/mid-'60s, when Washington was more
hostile to Peking than to the Kremlin, a new generation of
radicals arose critical and contemptuous of Khrushchev/
Brezhnev in the name of Third World nationalism. But
today over Afghanistan it is the American ruling class
which invokes the rhetoric of national independence in
attacking Soviet "hegemonism" and "superpowerism."

The New Left considered "the Russian question," i.e.,
the social character of the USSR, a scholastic topic of
dispute among the irrelevant "old left." To them the Cold
War was dead, Russia had become part of the rich white
man's world, a co-partner with the U.S. for conservatism
on a world scale. The real struggle was now between
the "Third World"— China, Vietnam, Cuba— and U.S.
imperialism.

This outlook was captured by the U.S.' most prominent
New Left "theoretician," Carl Oglesby, in his 1967
Containment and Change. Here the Chinese and Vietnam-
ese revolutions are presented simply as responses to foreign
domination, having little if anything to do with capitalism
versus communism. The Chinese Revolution "has nothing
at all to do with communism, but rather with the
independent organization of China and her acquisition of
modern fire." On Vietnam: ". . . one should be able to show
somehow that the issue of the Vietnam war is not Western
freedom versus Eastern slavery, but foreign versus local
continued on next page

Feudalist insurgent Idiis radical schoolteacher
near Iranian border.

24

SPARTACIST

control of Vietnam."

On U.S. -Soviet relations, Oglesby opined:

"With the Soviet Union, we have gone from confrontation
to detente. The relationship is no longer defined by its

anger and uncertainties Direct military confrontation

is feared and avoided equally by both sides, crises are
referred to hot lines instead of war rooms, and one
sometimes wonders if there is not something still springier
in the air: a slow convergence of political aims. The
European Cold War no longer finds Russians and
Americans peering at each other through gunsights.
Instead we have the experience of virtually integrated aid
programs in Afghanistan [!] and India."

This political worldview, which equated the global roles of
the U.S. and USSR, contained the rudiments of the
"superpower" doctrine even before much of the New Left
embraced Maoism and its doctrine of "Soviet social-
imperialism."

Western Maoism arose from the grafting of New Leftism
and Stalinism. A decisive shaping factor was the Vietnam-
ese Revolution, in which a successful struggle against
American imperialism was carried out under a traditional
Stalinist leadership. To the impressionistic New Leftists,
the "Third World" Stalinists seemed revolutionary as
against the Soviets. From here it was only a short step to
Mao's doctrine of rival superpowers.

The myriad Maoist sects have tended to come to terms
with the Peking-Washington alliance which has developed
ever since Nixon's trip to China in 1972, while the U.S. was
raining bombs on Vietnam. In the face of such events as
Chinese support to the CIA-engineered South African
invasion of Angola in 1975-76, many Maoists pulled back,
seeking to return to the good old days of "anti-imperialist
unity." But in Angola it was war-by-proxy between the
U.S. and the Soviet Union. Now it is face-to-face over
Afghanistan and there is no escaping. They must choose
their camps.

With the rapid heating up of the Cold War and the open
declaration of a Washington/ Peking axis, the Maoists
have come full circle. The events in Afghanistan only
underscore that those who refuse to defend the Soviet
Union against U.S. imperialism will inexorably be driven
into the arms of the State Department and Pentagon.
While Stalin suppressed proletarian revolution for an
alliance with the "progressive" bourgeoisie, for Maoists the

Trotsky on Revolution and
Self-Determination

We do not only recognize, but we also give full
support to the principle of self-determination,
wherever it is directed against feudal, capitalist
and imperialist states. But wherever the fiction of
self-determination, in the hands of the bourgeoi-
sie, becomes a weapon directed against the
proletarian revolution, we have no occasion to
treat this fiction differently from the other
"principles" of democracy perverted by capitalism.
— Social Democracy and the Wars of
Intervention in Russia 1918-1921

popular front against "Soviet social-imperialism" can only
be constructed as a bloc with the most vicious, anti-
Communist sections of the imperialist ruling classes.

At the core of Stalinist doctrine is the program of
"building socialism in one country." This is the ideology of
a narrow, nationalist bureaucratic caste which rests on the
foundations of a collectivized economy but stands opposed
to the program of proletarian revolution. The attempt to
counterpose China (or Albania) to Russia as the socialist
fatherland has proved a dead end. The rapprochement of
China with American imperialism has demonstrated that
the Maos and Dengs, under the guise of building
"socialism" in their country, are as willing to sell out the
revolution as the Stalins and Brezhnevs. Moreover, the
Peking Stalinists are today joined in a global counterrevo-
lutionary alliance with the main imperialist power against
the main anti-capitalist state power — the Soviet Union.
Should U.S. imperialism overthrow the USSR (as the pro-
Peking Maoists urge), this would also lead in short order to
the destruction of People's China by the same imperialist
power.

"Third Camp" Fever in the USec

The Afghanistan crisis has predictably thrown the fake-
Trotskyist United Secretariat of Ernest Mandel into utter
political disarray. At a late January USec meeting three
lines were presented. The right-minority resolution
advocated the pro-imperialist "Soviet troops out" line,
asserting that a victory by Muslim reactionaries would be
"much less harmful" than a prolonged Soviet presence. The
left-minority position, ludicrously coming from the
reformist American SWP, defended the Russian-backed
Kabul regime while minimizing the Soviet intervention.

The Mandelite plurality tries to split the difference,
playing both ends against the middle and saluting the
golden mean. Its resolution {Intercontinental Press, 3
March) upbraids the Kremlin for not "considering any of
the democratic and national sentiments of the oppressed
classes and peoples" and for "introduc[ing] extreme
confusion in the world proletariat"; it refuses to give the
intervention "the least political support" and declares it is
"opposed to the annexation of new territories by the

Against revolutionary "intervention" [the
French syndicalist J Louzon quite inappropriately
advances the old and uncontested principle: "The
emancipation of the working class can be
achieved only by the workers themselves." On a
national scale? Only within the framework of a
single country? Is it permissible for workers in
one country to aid the strikers of another? Can
they send arms to insurgents? Can they send their
army, if they have one? Can they send it either to
help the uprising or in order to prepare an
uprising, just as strikers send squads to pull out
workers in factories that have remained behind?
— "Defense of the Soviet Republic,
and the Opposition," Writings (1929)

Soviet Red Army runs over Afghan Islamic reactionaries.

Lochon/Gamma

Kremlin" — even if a social revolution is carried out. But
well practiced in the art of obfuscation, the Mandelites do
not call for withdrawal of Soviet forces; and after more
than 100 paragraphs of fulminating against the interven-
tion, they drop in, out of the blue, four sentences of the
most mealy-mouthed defensism.

There is now real trouble in Mandel's main European
sections. Almost half, 20 to 22 of the central committee of
the usee's badly tarnished "star" French section, the Ligue
Communiste Revolutionnaire (LCR), has taken an
outright pro-imperialist line. Arguing that Soviet interven-
tion "mocks the right of peoples to self-determination,"
they call for "actions by the anti-imperialist and workers
movement to press the Soviet Union to immediately
withdraw its troops from Afghanistan" (Rouge, 22
February). What "actions" do they have in mind? Perhaps
refusal by French dockers to load grain for the USSR?

If this large LCR minority has become "Carter Doctrine
socialists," the majority are hardly red revolutionaries.
They too condemn the Soviet action, but reject the call for
immediate withdrawal as playing into the imperialists'
hands.

The factional dissension in the once-leftist British
section, the International Marxist Group (IMG), is even
more deep-going. The original "Soviet Troops Out" article
by Tariq Ali (Socialist Challenge, 3 January) produced a
major furor. The IMG printed a number of letters raking
Ali over the coals for "joining the imperialist chorus" and
"dancing to the tune of the U.S. State Department." So a
couple of weeks later the IMG changed its line without
openly repudiating its earher counterrevolutionary posi-
tion. It still condemned the Soviet intervention but
admitted that "in the present situation a call for the
immediate withdrawal of troops would be tantamount to
being in favour of the victory of the rightist forces"
(Socialist Challenge, 17 January). No kidding!

Yet even this halfhearted "defense" of the Soviet forces
provoked an outpouring of criticism from the right. Letters
appeared in Socialist Challenge baiting the majority for
wanting to form "welcoming committees for the Red

Army" and urging the IMG to "junk the old Trotskyism."
Amid all this, Socialist Challenge (6 March) introduced a
new column entitled "Thinking Aloud" for Tariq Ali to
ventilate his "personal" (read, factional) views. He began
his first column: "I remain unrepentant on Afghanistan."

Thus just a few months after this Potemkin Village
"Fourth International" lost perhaps a third of its members
in the split of the Latin American-centered Bolshevik
continued on next page

International Spartacist
Tendency Directory

Ligue Trotskyste de France

Le Bolchevik, BP 135-10
75463 Paris Cedex 10, France
Spartacist League/Britain
Spartacist Publications
PO Box 185

London, WC1H 8JE, England

Trotzkistische LIga Deutschlands

Postfach 1 67 47

6000 Frankfurt/Main 1, West Germany

Spartacist League/U.S.

Box 1377, GPO
New York, NY 10116 USA
Spartacist Stockholm
Spartacist Publishing Co.
Box 4508

102 65 Stockholm, Sweden

Trotskyist League of Canada

Box 7198, Station A

Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Spartacist League of
Australia/New Zealand

GPO Box 3473

Sydney, NSW. 2001, Australia

26

SPARTACIST

Response to
Afghanistan

Tony Cliff's "Third
Campist" Socialist
Workers Party (left).
Tariq Ali's "Trotskyist"
International Marxist
Group (right).

Troops out of Alglipi*^!

Socialist Challenge

SOVIETTROOPSOUT
OFAFGHAMSTAie

Faction of political adventurer Nahuel Moreno, the USec
is once again wracked by internal strife, this time
concentrated in the Mandelite heartland. Mandel & Co.
are trying to downplay the extent of the dissension over
Afghanistan, but it is more potentially destructive than the
Moreno split, a somewhat accidental development arising
from the Argentine caudillo's overweening personal
ambition. In the present case, it is the fruit of Mandel's own
revisionism.

What we are now witnessing is the open rebellion by a
significant section of the USec, long schooled in New Left
anti-Sovietism and petty-bourgeois nationahsm, against
the Trotskyist program of unconditional military defense
of the Soviet degenerated workers state against imperial-
ism. These USecers, cadres and ranks, are being drawn into
the U.S. -led global counterrevolutionary alliance against
the USSR through the medium of those tendencies with
which they have long sought to regroup — East European
"dissidents," the soft Maoists (e.g., the French Organisa-
tion Communiste des Travailleurs), the Eurocommunists
(the circle around Jean Elleinstein) and various social-
democratic groupings (the British Socialist Workers Party
of Tony Cliff).

Tariq All: Anti-Soviet New Leftist

There is nothing accidental or episodic in Tariq Ali's role
in this factional situation. He is the representative par
excellence of New Left movementism and Third World
nationalism within the USec. A former New Left celebrity,
back in 1969 he edited an anthology. The New Revolution-
aries, featuring such notables as Fidel Castro, R6gis
Debray, Ernest Mandel and, perhaps prophetically, Tony
Cliff. His own contribution included among the "new
revolutionaries" Mao and Ho but definitely excluded the
stodgy Kremlin bureaucrats: "... Asian communism was to
prove itself more human, more humane and more willing to
admit its mistakes than its counterpart in the Soviet
Union." Ah, music to Pol Pot's ears.

Ali also echoed the Maoist line that the Soviet Union
exploits backward countries in its economic relations with
them:

"...The Soviet Union and East European countries, in
their trade relations with the exploited world, contribute
toward maintaining the unequal exchange. The Soviet
Union could easily pay more without harming its own
economy."

In other words, wealth should be transferred from the
workers and peasants of the USSR to the bourgeoisies of
the "Third World" — to the Pahlavis, Nassers and Indira
Gandhis.

If Ali responds to the Afghan crisis with the outlook of
1960s New Left Maoism, he uses some arguments bor-
rowed from the ideological arsenal of Khrushchevite
"peaceful coexistence" (a tour de force of Stalinist
ecumenism). The USec minority resolution presumably
submitted by Ali and his co-thinkers actually accuses
Brezhnev & Co. of something like "left adventurism" in
provoking imperialist militarism. It deplores that Soviet
intervention allegedly fuels:

"The imperialists' justification for their resumption of the
arms race, under the pretext that the Soviet Union is
demonstrating in Afghanistan that it intends to use force
to impose regimes loyal to it. The Afghanistan affair has
already made a shambles of the efforts of the workers
movement in the imperialist countries against the step-up
of the nuclear arsenal in Europe and the West."

— "Draft Resolution on the Soviet Intervention in
Afghanistan," Intercontinental Press, 3 March

This is, of course, the very rationale by which Soviet
Stalinism has for decades justified not supporting
revolutions in other countries. "Peaceful coexistence"
means precisely: don't "export" revolution; don't export
arms to revolutions. Do nothing to upset the imperi-
alists and weaken the "forces of peace" in the imperialist
countries.

IMandel's Chiclcens Come Home to Roost

In the late 1960s the Mandelites invented the term "new
mass vanguard" in order to identify themselves with the
burgeoning New Left Maoist current against the pro-
Moscow CPs. A 1969 USec majority resolution in praise of
Maoism states:

"...the sharp campaign which Peking unleashed against
the right-wing opportunist line of the CPs following
Moscow's lead... has objectively contributed to deepen
the world crisis of Stalinism and to facilitate the upsurge of
a new youth vanguard the world over. Inside that youth
vanguard the general sympathy for China and Maoist
criticism of the Kremhn's revisionism remains deep...."
—"Original Draft Resolution on the 'Cultural
Revolution' and Proposed Amendments —
Arranged in Two Columns," [SWF]
International Internal Discussion Bulletin,
June 1970

SUMMER 1980

27

When this drivel was written, Peking's criticism of Soviet
"revisionism" had become its main ideological basis for
declaring the USSR was a "social-imperialist, capitalist"
country. In the immortal words of the Chairman himself:
"The rise to power of revisionism means the rise to power of
the bourgeoisie." By 1969 the Mao regime was already
likening the USSR to Nazi Germany, an overture for a deal
with the "deniocratic" imperialist countries. In his memoirs
Henry Kissinger indicates that Peking's denunciation of
the Brezhnev Doctrine as "a fascist theory" was one of the
first signs which convinced him a rapprochement with
Mao's China was possible.

For over a decade the European USec has chased after
precisely those elements within the Stalinist milieu which
have broken with Moscow in favor of competing
nationalisms — for the Maoists, it was the Chinese and
lately the Albanian bureaucracies; for the Eurocommu-
nists, their own imperialist bourgeoisies. Mandel has
taught his followers that among Stalinists antipathy to the
Soviet leadership is the main criterion for healthy political
motion. Afghanistan shows many have taken this lesson to
heart.

Never given to "sectarian" narrowness, the USec
generously included in the "new mass vanguard" various
left social-democratic groupings, such as the French Parti
Socialiste Unifie (PSU), a habitat for renegades from
Trotskyism like Michel Pablo and Yves Craipeau.
Proposing unity to the PSU a few years ago, Mandel
assured its leaders that Trotskyism and the Fourth
International were mere "labels" to be negotiated away if
the organizational price was right.

In Britain for years the main political bedfellow of the
IMG has been the "state-cap" Socialist Workers Party of
Tony Cliff, who broke from Trotskyism in 1950, refusing to

support the Soviet bloc in the Korean War. Right now
when the Cliffite SWP is denouncing the Soviet action in
Afghanistan as "imperialist," the IMG is holding joint
meetings with these anti-Communist renegades. And at a
mid-February IMG national conference, the "majority" (a
bare 50 percent) voted to "launch a public campaign to
unite the forces of the IMG with those of the SWP." Even
the main opposition wanted to follow this liquidationist
course, only desiring to hold out for better terms (see "IMG
Lurches Toward Cliff," Spartacist j Britain, March 1980).

Pandering to the left social-democratic/ Eurocommunist
milieu, the USec has for years uncritically enthused over
pro-Western Soviet-bloc dissidents. In light of Carter's
present moves, we recall that in early 1979 the USec-
sponsored Labour Focus on Eastern Europe reprinted
without comment a call by a group of Soviet emigres for a
total economic, technical and cultural boycott of the
USSR. Circulating this reactionary, anti-Communist
propaganda caused Tamara Deutscher to withdraw as
sponsor of the journal (see box). So when the USec
majority now claims to oppose Carter's boycott of the
Moscow Olympics and "the imperialist sanctions," this
declaration is less than convincing.

Afghanistan Explodes Mandel's Detente

How does Mandel square his professed Trotskyism with
a regroupment orientation toward those who refuse to
defend the Soviet Union? Simply by proclaiming that
defense of the USSR against imperialism is irrelevant in
this happy age of detente. Mandel's conception of detente is
actually a version of the old 1960s Maoist "superpower"
condominium doctrine. He denies that U.S. imperialism
continued on next page

Tamara Deutscher Resigns as Sponsor of
USeo-Backed Journal

Dear Editor,

You have published, in the Labour Focus of January-
February 1979, a letter which contains an appeal to
Western Socialists and Communists. Your introduction
stresses the weight of the signatories as a 'very authorita-
tive group of Soviet socialists and civil rights campaign-
ers', and you obviously attach great significance to their
statement which poses 'very sharply ... very important
questions for socialists' and 'warrants serious thought'.
And yet there is in the whole issue no editorial comment in
which you distance yourself from, or in any way show
disagreement with, thej/iews expressed by the signatories
while your Introduction suggests that your editorial
board adopts at best a neutral attitude towards the
appeal.

Labour Focus is, as you say in the Statement of Aims,
not a journal of 'debate' but of 'information' and, in my
view, should not lend its pages to discussions, especially
of a kind which start from premises removed from
socialist principles. Most of the signatories of the Appeal
can hardly be described as socialists; and most can find

ample space to express their views in bourgeois and right-
wing papers.

The Appeal calls for nothing less than a wholesale
boycott of the USSR and a complete break of all relations
between West and East — in other words, for isolating the
Soviet Union and putting it into quarantine. Such
methods would in no way help the process of democrati-
sation the East. On the contrary, they would only
strengthen all reactionary forces in both camps. The not
so distant past has taught us that Stalinism was at its
worst in the period of the Soviet Union's isolation.

I have been watching with increasing unease your
treatment of some of the problems of dissent in the East.
The appearance of the Letter, without any critical
comment of its content, led me to the decision to
withdraw my sponsorship of the paper, and it is with real
regret that I feel I have to ask you to delete my name from
the list of sponsors.
With all personal good wishes,
Yours fraternally,
Tamara Deutscher.

— Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, March-April 1979

28

SPARTACIST

remains fundamentally hostile to the Soviet degenerated
workers state. Rather he defines the relationship as one of
jointly suppressing the revolutionary forces throughout
the world. Mandel claims that Brezhnev's Russia functions
essentially as world capitalism's gendarme, a position in
substance (if not in form) identical to that of the New
Leftish Maoists and "Third Campists" like Cliff.

Mandel has derided the Spartacist tendency as fixated
on Soviet defensism for our contention that Washington
has abandoned its post-Vietnam policy of detente and
returned to the Cold War path (ideologically expressed in
Carter's "Human Rights" campaign). After the Sino-
Vietnam war in February 1979, he reasserted; "... nothing
has changed in the basic aspect of the world situation,
which is the consistent pursuing of mutual peaceful
coexistence and collaboration by Moscow and Washing-
ton on a world scale" ("Behind Differences on Military
Conflicts in Southeast Asia," Intercontinental Press, 9
April 1979). Never mind that Washington rather openly
colluded with the Chinese invasion of a Soviet ally. Never
mind that the day that the Chinese army crossed the
Vietnamese border, the State Department warned the
Soviets against retaliating in kind. For Mandel, it's detente
uber alles.

His latest book. Revolutionary Marxism Today,
published a few months before the Afghanistan crisis,
actually prophesies:

"...I would deny that we are entering a new cold war
situation in which imperialism, more or less allied to
Peking, is preparing an aggressive drive against the Soviet
Union

"The basic trend in the current world situation, I would
argue, is not toward a new, full-fledged cold war between
Moscow and Washington, but a continuation of 'peaceful
coexistence' that has been pursued for several decades [?!]
now."

One can imagine that as the Trident missiles rise out of the
North Sea headed toward their Moscow target they pass
over the University of Louvain where a certain professor of
Marxism is lecturing that detente is alive and well and is the
main axis of world politics.

Remember how, when Michel Pablo wanted to tail after

the Kremlin in the 1950s, he invented a theory of "cen-
turies of deformed workers states." Mandel's present
equivalent — aimed at cozying up to anti-Soviet dissidents,
Eurocommunists and Jimmy Carter — is "decades of
peaceful coexistence."

Marx was fond of the British empiricist saying: facts are
stubborn things. In Afghanistan today the defense of the
USSR is posed with a directness and immediacy that not
even a centrist charlatan like Mandel can dodge. Everyone
knows that to call for Soviet withdrawal is to call for the
establishment of a fanatically anti-Communist government
on the southern border of the USSR. But for the USec to
militarily support the Soviet army in Afghanistan would
draw the line against almost every organization, tendency
and individual it has sought to regroup with for the past
five or even ten years.

After years of sweeping the Russian question under the
rug, the USec is now reaping the reward in the form of a
massive anti-Soviet bulge in the face of American
imperialism's warmongering over Afghanistan. Whether
the U See's deeply ingrained cynicism toward program can
stave off sharp and even factional polarization over the
central questions of revolutionary orientation in a period
of heightened bourgeois anti-Sovietism remains to be seen.
Is there anything left of the primitive leftist energies which
once characterized the young USec cadres who built
barricades in the Paris streets in May '68 and carried
Vietcong flags in the radical "mobilizations" over Vietnam?
Or have "the children of '68" grown up through the years of
tailing popular frontism into ordinary anti-Soviet social
democrats?

This much is clear: the consistent Trotskyist program of
the international Spartacist tendency, centering for the
backward countries on the struggle for the permanent
revolution — the fight for liberation under the leadership
not of the "anti-imperialist bourgeoisie" but of the
revolutionary proletariat — is the only road forward.

For unconditional military defense of the deformed and
degenerated workers states through socialist revolution in
the capitalist countries and political revolution against the
Stalinist bureaucracies! Extend the gains of the October
Revolution to Afghan peoples! ■

Spartacist

Organ of Revolutionary Marxism

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New Yorit, NY 10116 USA

SUMMER 1980

29

''Export of Revolution"...

(continued from page 9)

Versailles would come crashing down, and the floodgates
of revolution would burst open in Germany, spreading
over the entire continent. The very prospect made for an
almost overwhelming argument. To a certain extent Lenin
and the Politburo majority were willing to subordinate the
degree of indigenous support for the sovietization of
Poland to the goal of securing a common border with
Germany, then in the throes of a revolutionary situation.
And certainly with the Red Army on Germany's border in
the period 1920-23, the entire course of modern history
could have been radically altered.

Lenin's most complete statement of the international
significance of the Polish war was given in a speech to a
congress of leather industry workers on 2 October 1920:
"The Versailles Peace has turned Poland into a buffer state
which is to guard against German contact with Soviet
communism and is regarded by the Entente as a weapon
against the Bolsheviks

"Had Poland turned Soviet, had the Warsaw workers
received from Soviet Russia help they awaited and
welcomed, the Peace of Versailles would have been
smashed, and the entire international system set up as a
result of the victory over Germany would have collapsed.
France would then not have had a buffer protecting
Germany against Soviet Russia."

—Collected Works, Vol. 31 (1966)

Ironically, in comparison with the differences over the
Brest-Litovsk peace in 1918, Lenin and Trotsky now
switched roles. At that time it was Lenin who had most
adamantly pressed for concluding the "shameful peace" in
order to secure a respite for the newly formed Soviet state.
Trotsky, in advocating his "not war, not peace" position,
banked on a more or less imminent revolution in
Germany.

Whereas events proved Lenin right in 19 18, the course of
the Russo-Polish war did. not bear out his optimistic
projections. The Polish peasants, whipped up by the
Catholic clergy, resented the advancing Reds as conquer-
ors and not liberators. The memories of a century and a
half of national and religious oppression were still fresh in
the mind of the Polish rural majority. And the Red Army's
forced grain requisitions, coupled with some incidents of
vengeance against individuals by raw Russian soldiers,
didn't help win the mistrustful Poles to the Communist
cause.

Nor was the Soviet Russian advance welcomed in
general by the urban proletariat, which in its majority was
still under social-democratic leadership. The Polish
Communist Party, which had been forced underground
more than a year before, issued a call for a general strike,
but it found no response except among the militant miners
in the extreme southwestern industrial region of Dabrowa.
In Warsaw some workers even volunteered to serve in
Pilsudski's militias. After the Russians' defeat at the
historic battle of the Vistula, ' Lenin admitted that the
offensive provoked not class war within Poland but
national unity.

Stalin's Treachery in 1920

One of the lesser known aspects of the Russo-Polish war
was the treacherous role played by Stalin. Stalin was the

senior commissar in charge of the southern armies led by A.
Yegorov and S.M. Budienny. According to the plan of
attack, the western armies under Mikhail Tukhachevsky
would march directly on Warsaw, while the southern
armies under Stalin would first take Kiev and then turn
north to intersect Tukhachevsky outside Warsaw. One of
the reasons that the defeat of the Soviet armies at the battle
of the Vistula assumed such catastrophic proportions was
Stalin's conscious insubordination in refusing to link up
with Tukhachevsky in time.

When it seemed that Tukhachevsky's capture of Warsaw
was only days away, Stalin decided to get his own "prize"
rather than simply bring up the rear of Tukhachevsky's
triumphal entry into Warsaw. When the moment came for
the southern forces to turn north, Stalin instead persuaded
Budienny and Yegorov to continue west and take Lvov, a
Polish city of secondary importance. Thus, instead of the
two armies converging, a huge gap was opened between
them, leaving Tukhachevsky's flank entirely exposed.

Into this gap sprang Pilsudski. Later he described how
incomprehensible the actions of Yegorov/ Budienny were
to him:

"Their correct line of march was the one which would have
brought them nearer to the Russian main armies
commanded by Tuchachevsky, and this would also have
threatened the greatest danger to us. Everything seemed
black and hopeless to me, the only bright spots on the
horizon being the failure of Budyonny's cavalry to attack
my rear and the weakness displayed by the 1 2th Red Army
[of Yegorov]."

— quoted in Erich Wollenberg, The Red Army
(1938)

When the danger to Tukhachevsky's flank became
apparent, the Soviet Supreme Command repeatedly wired
continued on next page

30

SPARTACIST

urgent messages backed up by threats instructing Stalin to
proceed as planned. Stalin simply ignored these orders, and
Budienny and Yegorov wasted precious days and men
fruitlessly trying to take Lvov. Finally after more threats
from Moscow, Stalin dispatched Budienny's cavalry to the
north, but by then it was too late. Pilsudski launched a
counteroffensive that hit at Tukhachevsky's unguarded
flank and snatched Polish victory from the jaws of defeat.
It should be pointed out that imperialist France provided
Pilsudski with massive military support, including officers
for his army.

It remains unclear whether Tukhachevsky could have
taken Warsaw if Stalin had carried out his orders. In the
aftermath, Tukhachevsky claimed he could have, accusing
Stalin of treachery. Trotsky maintained that Stalin's
insubordination was a great, but not decisive, factor in the
defeat. But what is clear is that had StaHn not been
insubordinate, then the magnitude of the defeat would
surely have been less. The Red armies might not have been
thrown back so far, and the Soviet government might have
been able to conclude peace on far more favorable terms.
Thus, Stalin in his own way helped strengthen those
forces — the isolation of the USSR and its hostile
encirclement — which were to bring about a Theritiidorian
reaction with him as its bonapartist head.

"Revolution from Without"

Although Lenin recognized the necessity of concluding a
peace with Pilsudski after the defeat on the Vistula, other
Bolshevik leaders, notably Zinoviev, head of the Comin-
tern, minimized the magnitude of the defeat and talked
about waging a second Polish war. Not surprisingly, this
mood to "continue the offensive" was expressed even more
strongly in the command of the Red Army. Tukhachevsky,
the brilliant general who at age 26 had led the main Soviet
/ armies in the Polish war, vowed to hold his victory march
in the streets of Wmarsaw. He argued that a Soviet victory
* over Pilsudski was possible without an indigenous
proletarian revolution in Poland.

This idea had an appeal for many other Red Army
commanders. In his book From Dvina to Vistula, E.N.
Sergeyev, who commanded one of the armies in the march
on Warsaw, openly stated that many Red Army com-
manders had never really thought the Soviet invasion
would be met by a Communist-led revolution of the Polish
working class:

"The occupants in the political chanceries a long way from
the front were the only people who seriously believed in the
possibility of a Polish Revolution. We in the army had
little faith in it...."

— quoted in Erich Woilenberg, The Red Army

The "political chanceries" to which Sergeyev not too subtly
"referred were, of course, the offices of the Bolshevik
Politburo and Comintern.

It was after the defeat on the Vistula that Tukhachevsky
began to promote, quite unabashedly, the idea of imposing
in capitalist Europe a "revolution from without." He set
forth his views in lectures given at the military academy
beginning in 1921, and these were later published in
abbreviated form as a book. The Campaign Behind the
Vistula. Here Tukhachevsky was so explicit about
"revolution from without" that Pilsudski himself reprinted
it as an appendix to his own work, The Year 1920.

Where Tukhachevsky parted ways with the Bolshevik

leaders was in inverting the relationship between the
indigenous revolution and foreign military aid. The
Bolsheviks had always regarded the Red Army as an
auxiliary of the revolutionary movements abroad. In his
lectures Tukhachevsky referred to the Red Army itself as a
"socialist movement." And the key task of the Polish (or
any other) revolution — the destruction of the bourgeois
armed forces — was assigned to the Red Army:

"There is no doubt that the revolution of the Polish
workers would have become a reality if we had succeeded
in depriving the Polish bourgeoisie of its bourgeois army.
The conflagration caused by such a revolution would not
have stopped at the Polish frontiers; it would have spread
all over Europe like the waters of a wild mountain torrent.
"The Red Army will never forget this experience of
'revolution from without.' If Europe's bourgeoisie chal-
lenges us to another war, the Red Army will succeed in
destroying it. In such a case the Red Army will support and
spread the revolution in Europe." [our translation]

— reprinted as "The March Beyond the Vistula" in •
J. Pilsudski, L'Annee 7920 (1929)

Here Tukhachevsky stands closer to Napoleon than to
Lenin and Trotsky. He explicitly drew an analogy with the
revolutionary wars of Napoleonic France. Just give him a
chance, and the Russian Red Army will carry the
proletarian revolution to the West to the tune of the
"Internationale," just as Napoleon's armies carried the
bourgeois revolution eastward across Europe to the strains
of the "Marseillaise."

As head of the Red Army Trotsky in particular
polemicized against Tukhachevsky's doctrine. In this
Trotsky was acting as spokesman for the Bolshevik
leadership. He gave his most general reply in a December
1921 article entitled, "A Military Doctrine or Pseudo-
Military Doctrinairism?":

"Of course, not for a minute do we intend to conceal from
the workers, including the Red Army, that on principle we
are always for an offensive-revolutionary war in those
circumstances when it could aid the liberation of workers
in other countries. But to think that on the basis of this
principled declaration one can create an effective ideology
or 'educate' the Red Army is in the present circumstances
to understand neither the Red Army nor the present
circumstances

"In the monumental class struggle which is today on the
rise, the role of military intervention from whhout must
have only an attendant, assisting, auxiliary function.
Military intervention can speed up the denouement and
facilitate victory. But for this it is necessary that the
revolution mature not only in a social sense — that already
exists — but also in terms of political consciousness.
Military intervention is like an obstetrician's forceps: used
opportunely, it can ease the birth pangs; set into motion
prematurely, it can only produce a miscarriage." [our
translation]

— How the Revolution Was Armed {\923)

Trotsky further argued that, given the backwardness
of Russia compared to bourgeois Europe, Tukhachevsky's
doctrine of ever "on the attack!" was a "strategy of
adventurism."

A Revolutionary War in 1923?

Tukhachevsky returned to the subject of "revolution
from without" in 1923. It was placed on the agenda when
the French occupation of the Ruhr precipitated another
revolutionary crisis in Germany. The question of questions
among European ruling circles was whether Soviet Russia
would again invade Poland, either in response to a Polish
attack on revolutionary Germany or in anticipation of one.

SUMMER 1980

31

Indeed, the Soviet government made it clear that any
attack by Poland on Germany would be considered as an
attack on vital Soviet interests. A lead article in the Izvestia
of 29 September 1923 declared that "we have never
renounced our idea of furthering by all means the
development of the international revolution" [our empha-
sis] (quoted in L. Kochan, Russia and the Weimar
Republic [1954]).

However, the main aim of Soviet policy at that time was
to try to avoid war with Poland if at all possible. There were
two sound reasons for doing so. First, it was doubtful that
the Russian peasants, enjoying the respite of the market-
oriented New Economic Policy, could be mobilized for
another major war simply through political exhortation.
And second, another Russo-Polish war, no matter which
side initiated it, would almost certainly provoke French
intervention at least, and the Bolsheviks didn't want the
impending German revolution engulfed in war.

To the Red Army commanders like Tukhachevsky who
had a score to settle with Pilsudski, Trotsky argued that in
its present circumstances the most effective weapon Russia
had was not soldiers but grain. Germany was starving for
the bread Russia could supply. In turn, the Russian
peasants were clamoring for manufactured goods, which a
proletarian Germany could supply. In a speech to Red
Army military commanders in October 1923, Trotsky
stressed:

"We must ensure that the link between our fundamental
interests and those of the working people of Germany
becomes clear and tangible to every Red Army soldier."
[our translation]

— How the Revolution Was Armed

If Poland permitted the Soviet government to transport
grain across its territory to Germany and return with
manufactured goods, the beginnings of a Russo-German
economic federation would be established. Poland soon
would find itself caught as if in a vise; the Polish proletariat
would probably be able to come to power without foreign
military assistance. And if Pilsudski refused to negotiate
such a trade agreement, or terminated one as soon as its
implications became apparent, the Russian peasants would
then more clearly grasp the vital economic stake they had in
fighting another war with Poland. These strategic

calculations, however, turned out to be moot as the
German revolution was lost when the Communist Party let
shp the decisive moment for action.

In summary the interaction between indigenous
proletarian revolution and military intervention by a
workers state is a highly complicated question, containing
as it does a potential conflict between the strategic interests
of the world socialist revolution and the democratic right of
national self-determination. There is no simple formula
which covers any and every historical situation. The
Bolsheviks rejected both revolutionary military bonapart-
ism a la Tukhachevksy and social-democratic obeisance
before national sovereignty. This latter nationalist-
opportunist policy was adopted by Stalin in the 1930s in the
form of "peaceful coexistence" and pledges of "non-
interference in the internal affairs of other countries."

Perhaps the best encapsulation of the Bolshevik position
was given by Trotsky in 1921 after the Soviet conquest of
Menshevik-ruled Georgia set international social democra-
cy howling about "Red imperialism":

"A workers' state, in recognizing the right of self-
determination, thereby recognizes that revolutionary
coercion is not an all-powerful historical factor. Soviet
Russia does not by any means intend to make its military
power take the place of the revolutionary efforts of the
proletariats of other countries. The conquest of proletari-
an power must be an outcome of proletarian political
experience. This does not mean that the revolutionary
efforts of the workers of Georgia or any other country,
must not receive any military support from outside. It is
only essential that this support should come at a moment
when the need for it has been created by the political
development of the workers, and recognised by the class-
conscious revolutionary vanguard, who have won the
sympathy of the majority of the workers. These are
questions of revolutionary strategy, and not a formal
democratic ritual."

— Social Democracy and the Wars of Intervention
in Russia 1918-1921
But in distinction to every variety of pro-Russian or pro-
Chinese Stalinist, we recognize that the Red Army of Lenin
and Trotsky is separated from the Red Army of Brezhnev
by a bureaucratic counterrevolution under Stalin. Only a
proletarian political revolution in the USSR can truly
restore the Red Army and the Soviet state to their
internationalist and revolutionary mission. ■

1,200 Stop Nazis...

(continued from page 32)

need for a workers party based on the unions.

Timid reformists call on these same city rulers to ban the
Klan, but the racist Hitler-lovers were stopped by tenacious
struggle against the capitalist politicians. The bourgeoisie
will spmeday resort to the armed shock troops of race
terror, union-busting and anti-communism in a desperate
attempt to preserve its rule over the working class — the one
force with the power and unified interest to smash the
capitalist onslaught of depression and war. That is why the
government cannot "ban the Klan."

As Carter whips up chauvinism in his mad drive toward
imperialist war, as the economy goes to hell, the ultra-right
grows bolder. Even as ANCAN rallied, four black women
were wounded in Chattanooga as KKKers blasted

shotguns into a group of blacks. The KKK/Nazis are the
fascist fringe of the White House's perspective for a
popular mobilization for thermonuclear World War III
against the Soviet .Union. With Carter on the warpath
against Communism overseas, the KKK/Nazis feel it's
open season on leftists, blacks, labor and Jews here. In
working to interdict the fascists from carrying their terror
into the major industrial centers, we are therefore also
seeking to deprive the bourgeoisie of a rabid constituency
screaming for war on the USSR.

As Spartacist League spokesman Al Nelson said at the
April 19 rally:

"We need a workers party to get rid of the bosses, their
courts, their cops, their armed thugs, their fascists — to get
rid of them once and for all, to establish a workers society,
a socialist society, a workers government."

ANCAN ran the Nazis out of San Francisco— let's keep
them on the run! ■

32

SUMMER 1980

mi»^ ^^^^ /le/far/fs sa

Workers Vanguard

Labor/Socialist Mobilization on April 19

1 ,200 Stop Nazis in
San Francisco

The Nazis boasted they would goosestep into San
Francisco's Civic Center plaza April 19 to "celebrate"
Hitler's" birthday. But when the April 19 Committee
Against Nazis (ANCAN) organized a massive counter-
mobilization of labor and socialist groups, the race-terror
creeps turned tail and ran. Instead the Civic Center on
April 19 was a.sea of militant anti-Nazi protesters. Signs
reading "Hitler's Birthday Is No Holiday Here" made the
point: the'fascists would have gotten quite a thrashing if
th9y had shown their faces.

Initiated By militant unionists and heavily built by the
Spartacist League (SL), the demonstration was endorsed
by some 35 union officials and nine Bay Area unions. In
addition fo the several local presidents and exec board
members who addressed the rally, there were contingents
of phone workers with their official CWA local banners, as
well as militants in the International Longshoremen's and
Warehousemen's Union who were instrumental in building

strong support for the anti-Nazi action.

This is the second time that the SL has taken the lead in
mobilizing labor and its allies to stop the fascist terror
gangs. When, following the Greensboro massacre, the Klan
threatened to march in Detroit, the SL organized a
demonstration of 500, mainly blacks and auto workers,
proclaiming, "The Klan Won't Ride in the Motor City!"
But whereas Detroit black mayor Coleman Young took a
hard line and tried to ban the anti-fascist mobilization,
threatening to arrest the demonstrators, San Francisco
mayor Dianne Feinstein dared not challenge ANCAN's
support among union leaders head on. So the mayor,
counterposing "education" to mass mobilization, told
people to stay away. But despite a press blackout, upwards
of 1,200 turned out to demonstrate their hatred of the
Nazi/Klan race-terrorists and to applaud the speakers who
counterposed to the union-busting Democratic mayor the
continued on page 31

SPARTAOST

NUMBER 30

AUTUMN 1980

50 CENTS

A Workers
Poland
Yes!
The Pope's
Poland
No!

SEE PAGE 2

Polish Social Democrats
Arm in Arm with Clerical
Reaction

All the Pope's
Dissidents 6

SWP 1956 vs. SWP 1980

"Pure

Democracy"
or Pfriitical
Revolution in
East Europe. . .10

Revisionists on the
Dictatorship of the
Proletariat

Eurotrotskyist
Mandel vs.
Caudillo

Moreno 17

2

Pope's
Polanil No!

Everyone predicted it was coming. A restive, combative
working class, peasant strikes, massive foreign debt,
chronic and widespread food shortages, a powerful and
increasingly assertive Catholic church, the burgeoning of
social-democratic and clerical-nationalist oppositional
groupings. All the elements were there. Poland in the late
'70s was locked in a deepening crisis heading toward
explosion, an explosion which could bring either proletari-
an political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy or
capitalist counterrevolution led by Pope Wojtyla's church.

And when it came it gripped world attention for two
solid weeks. The Baltic coast general strike was the most
powerful mobilization of the power of the working class
since France May 1968. But was it a mobilization for the
working class? That is the decisive question.

There is now a settlement on paper. The bureaucracy has
agreed to allow "new, self-governing trade unions" with the
pledge that these recognize "the leading role" of the
Communist party and do not engage in political activities.
Insofar as the settlement enhances the Polish workers'
power to struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy,
revolutionaries can support the strike and its outcome. But
only a blind man could fail to see the gross influence of the
Catholic church and also pro- Western sentiments among
the striking workers. If the settlement strengthens the

SPARTACIST

working class organizationally, it also strengthens the
forces of reaction. ^

The Gdansk settlement cannot last. No Stalinist
bureaucracy — a parasitic caste which must monopolize
political power to preserve itself — can tolerate independent
working-class opposition. And in Poland today the notion
of such unions "staying out of politics" is plain ridiculous.
The situation in Poland is one of cold dual power. On top
of this, further clashes must come as the regime, massively
in debt to Western financial institutions, cannot concede
the enormous "free lunch" the workers are demanding. The
big money wage increases will either fuel runaway inflation
or even more severe shortages. Furthermore, the Kremlin
has made disapproving noises about the settlement, and
Soviet military intervention cannot be ruled out. The end
of the Baltic general strike was only the beginning of the
crisis of Stalinist Poland.

Workers Democracy or Clerical-Nationalist
Reaction?

Certainly the workers are reacting against bureaucratic
mismanagement, privilege and abuse. The Polish workers'
grievances are real and they are just. The firing of an old
militant, Anna Walentynwicz, a few months before her
retirement, which reportedly sparked the Lenin Shipyard
takeover in Gdansk, should infuriate every honest worker.
The existence of special shops exclusive to party members
and cops is an abomination, a rejection of the most basic
principles of socialism.

What of the workers' positive allegiances and general
political outlook? Early in the strike there were reports of
singing the Internationale, which indicates some element of
socialist consciousness. But while the imperialist media
always plays up any support for anti-communist ideology
in the Soviet bloc, there is no question that to a great degree
the Baltic workers and their principal leaders identify with
the powerful Catholic church opposition. It is not just the
external signs — the daily singing of the national hymn, "Oh
God, Who Has Defended Poland," the hundreds of strikers
kneeling for mass, the ubiquitous pictures of Wojtyla-John
Paul II, Lech Walesa tossing out pictures of the Virgin
Mary. The outside advisers to the strike committee
consisted of prominent figures in the Catholic ZNAK
group and these continue to advise the "new, self-governing
unions."

Even more ominous was the strike committee's demand
for "access by all religious groups [read Catholic church] to
the mass media." This is an aMr/-democratic demand which
would legitimize the church in its present role as the
recognized opposition to the Stalinist regime. In effect the
Baltic shipbuilders are asking for a state church in a
deformed workers state.

But that church is not loyal to the workers state. Far
from it! The Polish Catholic church (virulently anti-
Semitic) has been a bastion of reaction even within the
framework of world Catholicism. Especially since 1976 the
Polish church has become increasingly open and assertive
in its anti-Communism. Early last year the Wall Street
Journal (2 January 1979) observed: "Thus, the priesthood
has become in effect an opposition party."

This article also pointed out that the cardinal of Krakow
was especially responsible for the greater oppositional
stance of the church. A few months earlier this Polish

AUTUMN 1980

3

Lech Walesa is
"a committed
Catholic and
nationalist"
who "has not
the least in
common with
communism,"
according to
liberal West
German Der
Spiegel.

prelate had become the first non-Italian successor to the
throne of St. Peter in four centuries. Karol Wojtyla is a
dangerous reactionary working hand in glove with U.S.
imperialism (especially his fellow countryman Zbigniew
Brzezinski) to roll back "atheistic Communism," beginning
in his homeland. As we wrote when this PoHsh apti-
Communist was made pope: "... he now stands at the head
of many millions of practicing Catholics in East Europe, a
tremendous force for counterrevolution" ("The President's
Pope?" WVNo. 217, 30 October 1978).

The Polish episcopate, fearing both Russian miHtary
intervention and its inability to control a workers' uprising,
took a cautious tack during the Baltic general strike. But
whatever the hierarchy's present tactical calculations, in a
power vacuum the church, well-organized with a mass
base, will be a potent agency for social counterrevolution.

. Poland presents the most combative working class in the
Soviet bloc, with a history of struggling for independent
organizations going back to the mid-1950s. It is also the
one country in Eastern Europe with a mass, potentially
counterrevolutionary mobilization around the Catholic
church. Thus, unUke Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia
in 1968, the alternatives in the present Pohsh crisis are not
limited to proletarian political revolution or Stalinist
restabilization. At the same time, it is not Afghanistan
where the Soviet Red Army is playing a progressive role in
crushing an imperialist-backed, clerical-reactionary upris-
ing. In a sense Poland stands somewhere between Hungary
in 1956 and Afghanistan.

Trotskyism and "Free Trade Unions"

The Baltic strike committee's main demand and gain was
"free trade unions." This particular slogan, pushed for
years by the CIA-backed Radio Free Europe, has acquired
a definite anti-Communist and pro-Western connotation.
Remember the 1921 Kronstadt mutiny's call for "free
Soviets" — free from Communists, that is.

An integral part of the Trotskyist program for
proletarian political revolution in the degenerated/

deformed workers states is the struggle for trade unions
independent of bureaucratic control. Trade unions and the
right to strike would be necessary even in a democratically
governed workers state to guard against abuses and
mistakes by administrators and managers. But it is far from
clear that the "free trade unions" long envisioned by the
dissidents would be free from the influence of pro-Catholic,
pro-NATO elements who represent a mortal danger to the
working class.

In any case, in the highly politicized situation in Poland
today the "new, self-governing" trade unions cannot and
will not limit themselves to questions of wage rates,
working conditions, job security, etc. They will either be
drawn into the powerful orbit of the Catholic church or
have to oppose it in the name of socialist principle.

And in determining that outcome the presence of a
revolutionary vanguard party would be critical. A central
task for a Trotskyist organization in Poland would be to
raise in these unions a series of demands that will split the
clerical-nationalist forces from among the workers and
separate them out. These unions must defend the socialized
means of production and proletarian state power against
Western imperialism. In Poland today the elementary
democratic demand of the separation of church and state is
a dividing line between the struggle for workers democracy
and the deadly threat of capitalist restoration.

The nucleus of a Leninist-Trotskyist opposition in
Poland would have nothing to do with the present dissident
groups. It would denounce the social-democratic Commit-
tee for Social Self-Defense (KOR) for helping tie the
workers to imperialism, the pope and Pilsudskiite anti-
Soviet nationalists. But among the rebellious workers there
must be elements that are fed up with the bureaucracy and
look back to the traditions of Polish Marxism, while
having no truck with bogus "democracy" in priests'
cassocks. It is among this layer above all that revolution-
aries must struggle to win the cadres to build a genuinely
communist proletarian party, capable of opening the road
continued on next page

English Edition

SPARTACIST

(Fourth Internationalist)
An Organ of Revolutionary Marxism

Organ of the International Executive Committee of the
international Spartacist tendency

EDITORIAL BOARD: Joseph Seymour (editor), Helene Brosius,
Elizabeth Gordon, Jan Norden, Charles O'Brien, James Robertson,
Reuben Samuels, John Sharpe, David Strachan
PRODUCTION MANAGER: Noah Wilner
CIRCULATION MANAGER: Karen Wyatt
SPARTACIST PUBLISHING CO.

Box 1377, G.PO., New York, N.Y. 10116. Telephone: 732-7862

Opinions expressed in signed articles or letters do not necessarily
express the editorial viewpoint.

Number 30

■tySi^' X-523

Autumn 1980

4

SPARTACIST

to socialism by ousting the bureaucratic caste which falsely
rules in the workers' name.

Break the Imperialist Economic Stranglehold!

The abandonment of agricultural collectivization in
1956 has played no small role in contributing to Poland's
present economic and political crisis. It has saddled the
country with a backward, smallholding rural economy
grossly inefficient even by East European standards. And
the strength of the Polish church is based on the social
weight of the rural petty bourgeoisie. Today over a third of
the labor force still toils in the fields, while 80 percent of
farmland is privately owned. Only by eliminating their
hideous poverty and rural isolation can the hold of
religious obscurantism on the masses be broken. An
immediate, key task for a revolutionary workers govern-

ment in Poland is to promote the collectivization of
agriculture. • ^

Responding to the violent strikes/protests over food
price increases in 1970-71, the new Gierek regime promised
huge wage increases for the workers, higher procurement
prices and state pensions for the peasants plus the rapid
modernization of Polish industry. This "economic miracle"
(a term actually used in official propaganda) was to be
achieved through massive loans from the West and also the
Soviet Union.

In an immediate sense this economic maneuver, aimed at
transforming Poland into something like an East European
Japan, was derailed by the 1 974-75 world depression which
sharply contracted the country's export markets. At a
deeper level, Gierek's economic gamble failed because the
Stalinist regime is incapable of mobilizing the enthusiasm
and sense of sacrifice of the Polish working people. This

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AUTUMN 1980

5

Edward Gierek (left) placed Poland deeply in debt to
Helmut Schmidt's (right) West Germany attempting
to buy off a combative working class.

incompetence is endemic in a bureaucracy, more due to a
lack of an effective feedback than to material privilege.

In 1978 over 50 percent of Poland's hard currency
earnings were absorbed by debt service, in 1979 over 80
percent and today over 90 percent. Poland has avoided
becoming the world's biggest bankrupt only by agreeing to
austerity programs imposed by its imperialist creditors. At
the same time, the Russian leadership, fearing a popular
explosion if the Polish masses are pushed too hard, is
paying a good part of Warsaw's foreign debt. In one sense
Poland has become the intermediary through which
Western finance capital sucks surplus out of the Soviet
workers and peasants (whose living standards are substan-
tially lower than those of the Poles).

While the Polish Stalinist regime's economic misman-
agement is today glaring, the historical superiority of
collectivized property and centralized planning, even when
saddled with a parasitic bureaucracy, remains indisput-
able. Between 1950 and 1976 the advanced capitalist
economies grew at an average annual rate of 4.4 percent,
the backward capitalist economies at 5 percent and the
centrally planned East European economies 7.7 percent
{Scientific American, September 1980).

The Polish workers must not pay for the gross
mismanagement of the Gierek regime nor should they have
any confidence in the bureaucracy's "economic reforms."
Egalitarian and rational economic planning is possible
only under a government based on democratically-elected
workers councils (Soviets). As a revolutionary, transitional
step toward that, Polish workers must struggle against the
bureaucracy for control over production, prices, distribu-
tion and foreign trade.

A revolutionary workers government in Poland would
cancel the foreign debt. Well, it might export comrade
Edward Gierek to West Germany where he can work off his

obligations in a Ruhr coal mine. A very good idea, some
Polish worker might say, but will the bankers of Frankfurt
write off $20 billion with a shrug? What of imperialist
retaliation, economic or military? To this inevitable
reaction the Polish proletariat must appeal to the workers
of West Europe: We do not want to be the clients of your
masters but your comrades in a new venture —
international socialist planning in a Socialist United States
of Europe!

For the Revolutionary Unity of the Polish and
Russian Workers!

All organized forces in Polish political life — the Stalinist
bureaucracy, the church and all wings of the dissident
movement — each in their own way inculcate hostility to
Russia as the enemy of the Polish people. A hallmark for a
revolutionary party in Poland is a positive orientation to
the Russian working class. And this is not simply a
question of abstract internationalism, it is a matter of life
and death.

Illusions about the good will of the Western capitalist
powers common in East Europe do not extend to the Soviet
Union. Having lost 20 million fighting Nazi Germany, the
Soviet people understand that NATO's nuclear arsenal is
targeted at them. The Soviet masses also know that the
imperialist powers' war against their country, hot and cold,
began with the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917.

The Soviet working people fear the transformation of
East Europe into hostile, imperialist-allied states extending
NATO to their own border. The Kremlin bureaucrats
exploit this legitimate fear to crush popular unrest and
democratic aspirations in East Europe, as in Czechoslo-
vakia in 1968. There were numerous reports that Soviet
soldiers were shaken when on occupying Prague they
encountered not a bloody fascistic counterrevolution, as
they had been told, but protests by Communist workers
and left-wing students.

Revolutionary Polish workers cannot hope to appeal to
Soviet soldiers unless they assure them that they will defend
that part of the world against imperialist attack. And a
proletarian political revolution in Poland must extend
itself to the Soviet Union or, one way or another, it will be
crushed.

• For trade unions independent of bureaucratic control
and based on a program of defending socialized
property!

• For the strict separation of church and state! Fight
clerical-nationalist reaction! Guard against capitalist
restorationism!

• Promote the collectivization of agriculture!

• For workers control of production, prices, distribution
and foreign trade!

• For proletarian political revolution against the Stalinist
bureaucracy — For a government based on
democratically-elected workers councils (Soviets)!

• Break the imperialist economic stranglehold — Cancel
the foreign debt! Toward international socialist econom-
ic planning!

• For military defense of the USSR against imperialism!
For the revolutionary unity of the Polish and Soviet
working classes!

• For a Trotskyist Party in Poland, section of a reborn
Fourth International! ■

6

SPARTACIST

Polish Social Democrats Arm in Arm
with Clerical Reaction

All the Pope's Dissidents

"The strikes in Poland mark a significant turn in Eastern
Europe because workers and dissident intellectuals have
joined forces in a major conflict with the Government,"
noted a news analysis in the New York Times (23 August).
As to the existence of the alliance th^re is no doubt. From
the beginning of the Polish strike wave in early July and in
the early stages of the shipyard occupations, dissident
circles in Warsaw were the main source of information for
the imperialist press. In addition, several of the key strike
leaders have been publicly associated over the past several
years with opposition defense groups, and they have drawn
in prominent Catholic intellectuals as "expert advisers." So
while the ruling bureaucracy has been reluctant to use force
against workers in the Baltic ports, on August 20 police in
the capital rounded up 14 well-known dissidents accused of
illegal association.

Who are the Polish dissidents? Western commentators
hail the appearance of a "worker-intellectual alliance." Yet
the non-Stalinist left-wing press sounds the same theme.
Thus we find favorable interviews with dissident leader
Jacek Kuron being printed everywhere from the liberal Le
Monde and Der Spiegel to publications of the ostensibly
Trotskyist United Secretariat. Meanwhile, New York
Times columnist Flora Lewis (whose articles often seem to
reflect the views of the CIA) praises Kuron as "a
responsible man, a moderate and a patriot." Is this the
"new coalition" which sophisticated Western fomenters of
counterrevolution in the Soviet bloc degenerated /de-

formed workers states have been looking for as their
"captive nations" relics fade into oblivion? Or does it
portend a movement for "socialist democracy," as some on
the left would have us believe?

Certainly none of the prominent dissident groups and
personalities has a good word to say about socialism, which
is identified with the perversion of proletarian rule
represented by the present Stalinist bureaucracy. The
dissidents' role as a conduit to the capitalist media is
nothing new — Sakharov has been at it for years in the
Soviet Union. Nor are appeals to the imperialists via the
UN, the Helsinki Agreements, etc. What is particularly
ominous about the Polish dissidents, who range from
social democrats to openly Pilsudskiite reactionary
nationalists, is their active (and largely successful) effort to
form an alliance with the Catholic hierarchy. For it is the
church together with the land-holding peasantry which
form the social basis for counterrevolution in Poland.

KSS-KOR: Social Democrats
for Popery

The best-publicized Polish dissident group in the West is
the Committee for Social Self-Defense (KSS), better
known by its original name Workers Defense Committee
(KOR). The leading spokesman for KSS-KOR is Jacek
Kuron, and its newsletter Robotnik includes among its
correspondents Lech Walesa, the leader of the Interfactory

Social-democratic KOR's Robotnik halls Pope
Wojtyla-John Paul II in 1979 as "the defender of
human rights."

Adam Michnik

^'P^ Jacek Kuron

AUTUMN 1980

7

Strike Committee centered on the Lenin Shipyard in
Gdansk. The KOR was formed after the suppression of the
June 1976 strikes at Radom and Ursus, and originally
centered its activities on raising funds for and demanding
release/reinstatement of the hundreds of workers arrested
and fired at that time. After a general amnesty a year later it
became the KSS and concentrated on building ties to key
factories through Robotnik. Most of the pseudo-
Trotskyist left in the West has come out in support of the
KSS-KOR in varying degrees.

Because of its name and origins and the reputation of
Kuron, KOR is sometimes referred to by superficial
observers as "Marxist in orientation." Social-democratic is
a far more accurate description, and even that does not do
justice to some of the anti-Marxist elements around it. Of
the original 24 founders of KOR, six are former members
of the pre-war Polish Socialist Party (PSP), among them
the prominent economist Edward Lipinski. (Robotnik was
the name of the PSP paper as well.) The list also includes a
former chairman of the Christian Democratic Party, a
delegate of the World War II London exile government,
various activists from the 1968 student movement (among
them historian Adam Michnik), left Catholic writers (such
as former party member Jerzy Andrzejewski, author of
Ashes and Diamonds), several veterans of the 1944
Warsaw uprising and Rev. Jan Zieja ("Polish Army
Chaplain in the 1920 and 1939 campaigns" — i.e.,adied-in-
the-wool Pilsudskiite priest who twice fought the Red
Army).

Jacek Kuron was first known in the West for co-
authoring (with Karol Modzelewski) an "Open Letter to
Communist Party Members" in 1964; for this he became a
victim of bureaucratic repression, spending six years in jail.
The United Secretariat opportunistically hailed the Kuron-
Modzelewski text, with its syndicalist program and fuzzy
analysis (which called Poland a "bureaucratic state") as the
"first revolutionary Marxist document" to come out of the
post-war Soviet bloc. Since then, however, Kuron has
moved far to the right, now posing the struggle in East
Europe as one of "pluralism vs. totalitarianism." In his
"Thoughts on an Action Program" Kuron supports
peasant struggles for private property, claims "the Catholic
movement is fighting to defend freedom of conscience and
human dignity," and concludes with a call for the
"Finlandization" of Poland:

"We must strive for a status similar to Finland's: a
parliamentary democracy with a limited independence in
the field of foreign policy where it directly touches the
interests of the USSR."

The Clerical Opposition

Marxism it ain't. But this social-democratic program for
a peaceful restoration of capitalism represents the left wing
of the dissident movement. The right wing is openly
clerical-nationalist. There was a split in KOR in 1977
leading to the formation of ROPCIO, the Movement for
the Defence of Human Rights. The latter is based on the
founding declaration of the UN and the Helsinki accords
and offers itself as an instrument to "cooperate with all
international organizations which defend human
rights...." Where KOR publishes Robotnik, ROPCIO
puts out Gospodarz (The Peasant) and appeals to the
Catholic rural population. And this is not the Catholicism

of Vatican II, either. The Economist (9 September 1978)
refers to this outfit as "the stronghold of more conservative,
national and — with some of its members — traditional anti-
semitic tendencies." To get ROPCIO's number, one only
has to note that the first signer of its platform is General
Borutz-Spiechowicz, the highest commanding officer of
pre-World War II Poland, and that it distributes Pilsudski
calendars.

ROPCIO, in turn, gave rise to an even more reactionary
group, the Confederation of Independent Poland (KPN),
whose stated goal is to "end Soviet domination by
liquidating the power of the Polish United Workers Party."
Then there comes the Polish League for Independence
(PPN), a clandestine group, and remnants of the pre-war
ultra-rightist, anti-Semitic, fascistic National Democratic
Party. All of them, of course, cover themselves with
rhetoric about "democracy." This gives rise to the Polish
dissident joke: "Question: What's a Polish nationalist?
Answer: Someone who wants to drive the Jews out of
Poland even though they aren't there any more." More re-
spectable than these would-be pogromists is the liberal
Catholic ZNAK movement, which has several representa-
tives in parliament. While ZNAK leaves clandestine
bravado for the fringe groups, their aims are no less
counterrevolutionary: they are merely waiting until an
continued on next page

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SPARTACIST

explosion when they will step in as the only mass-based
opposition.

The Dissidents' Pope

The core of the clerical opposition, of course, is the
Catholic hierarchy, a disciplined army extending from the
village priest right up to the Vatican. Stalin's famous
remark, "How many divisions does the pope have?"
indicates military realism. But in Catholic Poland,
probably the most religious European country today (even
the men go to mass!), the church is a powerful political
force. Unlike Hungary's Cardinal Mindszenty, who was
discredited by cooperation with the Horthy dictatorship,
the Polish pope (who brags he once was a worker) could be
an effective rallying point for counterrevolution. A
revealing article by the former editor of the CIA's house
organ, Problems of Communism, Abraham Brumberg,
makes this crystal clear:

"The Catholic Church has been crucial in the growth of a
political opposition in Poland. Had it not been for the
support of the Church, even the new alliance between 'the
intelligentsia, village, and workers' to which Kuron refers
would probably have failed to survive the hatred of the
authorities."

— New York Review of Books, 8 February 1979

Brumberg points out that the original KOR demands for
amnestying workers arrested and fired in the June 1976
strikes were almost identical to those of the episcopate.
"Since then, the parallels between statements by the
Church — and especially by Cardinal Wyszinski, whom
Michnik strongly, if not uncritically, admires — and those
of the opposition have become even more conspicuous."
He points out that supporters of the ZNAK group have
participated in the "flying university" circles sponsored by
KOR, which in Krakow used churches for its classes with
the permission of then-Archbishop Wojtyla. Michnik
described the new pope as one of the two "co-founders of
the anti-totalitarian policy of the Polish Episcopate" {Der
Spiegel, 23 October 1978). Michnik, a Jew, is so enamored
of the new, "enlightened" Catholic primate that he wrote of
the pope's visit last year:

"It will be a powerful demonstration of the bond between
the Polish people and the world of Christian culture, a
demonstration of their solidarity with the Catholic
Church, and a demonstration of their yearning for
freedom, the champion of which they see as being their
fellow countryman John Paul II, the defender of human
rights."

For Polish Trotskyism!

This paean to the standardbearer of capitalist restora-
tion in Poland was printed without comment in Labour
Focus on Eastern Europe (July-August 1979), a joint
publication of supporters of the USec and the "state-
capitalist" British SWP of Tony Cliff. But these pseudo-
Trotskyists are not satisfied with such a tepid brew. A
subsequent issue of Labour Focus reprints an interview (by
the French USec paper Rouge) with Leszek Moczulski,
who was a member of the Moczar faction of the PUWP at
the time it ran the 1968 anti-Semitic purge and now heads
the KPN. The journal comments that Moczulski is more
militantly anti-government than KOR, and hails the
formation of his clerical-reactionary party as "an event

almost without precedent in the history of Eastern Europe
since the late 1940s"! Meanwhile, USec leader Ernest
Mandel laments that the Stalinist bureaucracy in Poland
has not "permitted a democratic and intense political life,
including a legal Catholic party. . ." ([SWP] International
Internal Discussion Bulletin, October 1979).

This pandering to clerical reaction is a far cry from the
revolutionary social democracy of a Rosa Luxemburg,
who wrote in 1905:

"The clergy, no less than the capitalist class, lives on the
backs of the people, profits from the degradation, the
ignorance and the oppression of the people. The clergy and
the parasitic capitalists hate the organized working class,
conscious of its rights, which fights for the conquest of its
liberties."

— "Socialism and the Churches"

In fact, in all the publications of the Polish dissidents which
we have consulted, some hundreds of pages, there is not
one reference to Luxemburg, Poland's greatest contribu-
tion to the Marxist movement. "Naturally," because she
was a Jew and hardly a Polish nationalist. But neither is
there a reference to other authentic Polish Communists,
such as Julian Marchlewski, Leo Jogiches and Felix
Dzerzhinsky. One of the greatest crimes of the Polish
Stalinist bureaucracy is that it has discredited the name of
communism among thinking workers.

Now the outcome of the strike has pushed the social-
democratic dissidents further to the right, further toward
clericism and toward the imperialists. A few days after the
settlement KOR leader Jan Litynski waxed eloquent over
the historic mission of the Polish church, in an interview
with Brumberg:

"In general it seems to me that the Catholic Church over
the past thirty years has displayed so much wisdom,
common sense and realism, that we are fully entitled to
trust it. I'm absolutely convinced that the Church will
never do anything that might prove harmful to the
interests of the nation."

— "After Gdansk: Two Interviews," New York
Review of Books, 9 October

And writing in the prestigious West German Der Spiegel
(15 September), Michnik calls for capitalist economic
blackmail:

"... I would like to repeat my counsel to Western public
opinion: economic help to the new leadership in Poland
should be made dependent on respecting the provisions of
the Gdansk settlement."

The present crop of Polish dissidents are
overwhelmingly enemies of the cause of proletarian
socialism. They act as direct conduits to the church and the
West. Today we do not see "dissident" Stalinists of the
Titoist mold. On the contrary, the most left-wing are the
East European equivalent of the "Eurocommunists." But
where in the capitalist West this is but another variety of
reformism, more closely tied to its "own" bourgeoisie, in
the Soviet bloc countries passing from Stalinist to
Eurocommunist means joining the camp of counterrevolu-
tion. Authentic Trotskyism stands not for the bogus "unity
of all anti-Stalinist forces" — including disciples of Wojtyla
and Brzezinski — but for a class-conscious communist
opposition to the parasitic bureaucracy. And those would-
be leftists who today follow the Kurons and Michniks
should realize that if they are successful in bringing off a
national revolt together with the clerical reactionaries,
Kania & Co. will be the first to go, but they will be next. ■

AUTUMN 1980

9

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10

SPARTACIST

SWP 1956 vs. SWP 1980

6i

Pure Democracy" or
Revolution in East Europe

Classic symbol of the
and dragged through

Shane Mage's The Hungarian
Revolution was published in 1959
as a pamphlet by the forerunner of
the Young Socialist Alliance, youth
group of the American Socialist
Workers Party (SWP). (Mage
became one of the founding leaders
of the Spartacist tendency, though
subsequently he abandoned Marx-
ism.) The material in this pamphlet
was a central element in the devel-
opment of our tendency's under-
standing of proletarian political
revolution and capitalist counter-
revolution in the East European
deformed workers states, and it is
exceptionally prescient concerning
the present crisis in Poland.

The core of the pamphlet is a
1957 factional polemic against the
right-wing majority of the Shacht-
manite Independent Socialist
League (ISL) and Young Socialist
League (YSL). The right wing's advocacy of "general
democratic aims" in the Hungarian Revolution was an
important, final step in its liquidation into "the State
Department socialism" of official American social democ-
racy. The "Third Campist" Shachtmanites' unification
with Norman Thomas' Socialist Party-Social Democratic
Federation (which they soon came to dominate) as well as
the nature of the Hungarian Revolution itself pushed the
left wing of the ISL/YSL, led by Mage, James Robertson
and Tim Wohlforth, toward Trotskyism and a fusion with
the then-revolutionary SWP in 1958. Thus, Mage's The
Hungarian Revolution was an important polemical attack
by the then-Trotskyist SWP on its principal social-
democratic opponent.

The heart of Mage's argument (reprinted below) is that
"pure democracy" in East Europe — a sovereign parliament
based on free elections — would likely lead to the victory of
a petty-bourgeois, clericalist party (such as the Hungarian
Smallholders or Polish Peasant parties), which would in
short order restore capitalism. Mage further pointed out
that such counterrevolutionary parties need not call for nor
effect the immediate denationalization of statified indus-
try. Rather they would subordinate the nationalized
industry to the interests of the domestic petty bourgeoisie
and international capital. In this Mage was not expressing
some peculiar, heterodox view, but was following Trotsky
who in 1937 wrote: "Should a bourgeois counterrevolution
succeed in the USSR, the new government for a lengthy
period would have to base itself upon the nationalized
economy" ("Not a Workers' and Not a Bourgeois State?,"
Writings [m7-3S]).

1956 Hungarian Revolution: Stalin's statue toppled
the streets of Budapest.

At the same time. Mage insisted that such a counterrevo-
lution was not what had occurred in Hungary in October-
November 1956. The effective organs of power were the
workers councils, which expressed an, albeit confused,
socialist consciousness. The clerical-reactionary forces
around Cardinal Mindszenty were relatively weak.

Reading this 1959 Young Socialist pamphlet today, the
reformist degeneration of the SWP in the past two decades
becomes strikingly visible. The parallelism between the
Shactmanites' position on Stalinist-ruled East Europe in
the 1950s and that of the SWP (and its bloc partner, the
West European-centered followers of Ernest Mandel)
today is remarkable, indeed almost uncanny. Both ignore
or deny outright the counterrevolutionary potential of the
Catholic church. And the Catholic church is qualitatively
more powerful in Poland today than in Hungary in 1956.
Both support organized social democracy in East
Europe — the Shactmanites Anna Kethly's Hungarian
Social-Democratic Party, the SWP/Mandelites Jacek
Kuron's Committee for Social Self-Defense (KOR) in
Poland. Both call for full "democratic" rights for all
political formations, including counterrevolutionary ones.

The increasingly oppositional stance of Pope Wojtyla's
church, in bloc with the social-democratic KOR, has forced
the revisionist "Trotskyists" into the role of lawyers for
clerical reaction in Poland. About a year ago Mandel came
out for the legalization of a Catholic party in Poland.
Today the SWP explicitly endorses the Polish strikers'
a«/i-democratic demand to grant Cardinal Wyszinski's
episcopate special access to the state-owned media. "I'd like
to see a daily Wyszinski Hour on television," says Militant

AUTUMN 1980

11

staff writer Fred Feldman at a New York City forum on 30
August.

Yet one of the main programmatic conclusions of
Mage's The Hungarian Revolution is the need to restrict
the democratic rights of the Catholic church and clericalist
political groups in East Europe and, if necessary, to
suppress them. Mage's 1959 pamphlet was by no means the
first nor the only time the SWP, when it was still Trotskyist,
recognized the counterrevolutionary role of clerical-
nationalist forces in Stalinist-ruled East Europe. The
February 1947 issue of the SWP's Fourth International
contains a scathing polemic against the Shachtmanites by
Ernest Germain (Mandel) entitled "The Conflict in
Poland." While this polemic is marred by Mandel's belief
that the Stalinists were incapable of overturning capitalism
in East Europe, it rightly savages Shachtman for defending
the democratic rights of Polish bourgeois parties. Mandel
singles out Stanislaw Mickolajczyk's mass Peasant Party
as the main reactionary force in Poland. "Mickolajczyk,
personally, is an ultra-reactionary poHtician," he writes,
who serves "as a shield for the underground bourgeois
opposition up to the moment when the latter will be able,
given a different national and international conjuncture, to
overthrow the present [Stalinist] regime." Mandel then goes
on to state in capital letters:

"WE COUNTERPOSE TO THE POLICE TERROR
AND PROVOCATIONS OF THE STALINISTS THE
REVOLUTIONARY TERROR OF THE MASSES as a
thousand times more effective method of fighting fascism.
We demand compete freedom of the workers' movement
which includes . . . above all the freedom to arm a powerful

workers' militia, which will eliminate the fascist bands

Not for a moment, however, do we undertake the defense
of our main enemy, the Polish bourgeoisie and all its
political lackeys." [emphasis in original]

At one time Mandel and the SWP called for
"REVOLUTIONARY TERROR" against the Mickolaj-
czyks and Wyszinskis in Poland. Today, they, just like their
Shachtmanite opponents of yore, defend the same Polish
political lackeys of the imperialist bourgeoisie.

Mage's pamphlet also contains a devastating attack on
Herbert Aptheker's The Truth About Hungary, the
principal American Stalinist defense of the Kremlin's
crushing of the Hungarian Revolution. The leading
historian of the CPUSA attempts to convince his readers
that this vast popular, proletarian-centered uprising was all
a result of a deep-laid imperialist plot. Mage has little
difficulty and much evident polemical relish in exposing
and demolishing Aptheker's endless lies and distortions.

A more serious and sophisticated apology for the Soviet
military intervention came from a pro-Stalinst faction in
the SWP led by Sam Marcy. The Marcyites argued that, in
the absence of Trotskyist leadership, the workers'
bourgeois-democratic illusions would inevitably lead them
to accept the restoration of capitalism. They further
maintained that that was just what was happening in
Hungary when the Russian Stalinists cut the process short.

Mage wasn't able to deal with the Marcyite position,
then internal to the SWP. However, that section of his
reply to Aptheker (reprinted below) explaining why the
Hungarian uprising was in essence a proletarian political
revolution stands as an answer to the Marcyites as well.

As Mage points out, the real power in the land were the
workers councils, which were clearly not anti-communist.
Indeed, they overwhelmingly supported the national-
liberal Stalinist Imre Nagy. The Budapest revolutionary

committees elected as co-leaders of the Revolutionary
Military Committee a Communist, Colonel Pal Maleter,
and General Bela Kiraly, former Communist who remained
closely associated with the Nagy group. The Budapest
Parliament of Workers Councils adopted as its first
programmatic principles that "the factory belongs to the
workers" and that "the supreme controlling body of the
factory is the workers council" (reproduced in Bill Lomax,
Hungary 1956 [1976]). While this is a syndicalist deviation
from Marxian socialism, it is also incompatible with a
capitalist order and parliamentary sovereignty over
economic policy. On the available evidence, the Hungarian
workers looked toward an idealized version of Titoist
Yugoslavia — an independent "socialist" country with
workers self-management.

Mage's writings on the Hungarian Revolution are not
without weaknesses. As a subjective revolutionary in
transition from Shachtmanism to Trotskyism, he at this
point did not accept the deformed workers state theory and
still retained a soft attitude toward undifferentiated "anti-
Stalinism." Thus, he allowed neutralist protestations by the
Hungarian dissidents to go uncriticized. More seriously, he
maintained that even if capitalist restoration were a certain
outcome of the upheaval, "the actual Russian intervention
would still be an impermissible denial to the Hungarian
people of the right to choose their own social system."
Mage here is guilty of elevating the bourgeois-democratic
right of national self-determination over defense of
proletarian state power and of the USSR against capitalist-
imperialism.

These questions are in a way more sharply posed in
Poland today than in Hungary in 1956. Unlike the
Hungarian working class in 1956, which expressed a partial
and confused socialist consciousness, the Polish strikers
and their main leaders clearly identify with the powerful
Catholic church opposition and also exhibit pro-Western
sentiments. The liberal West German newsweekly Der
Spiegel (8 September) described the premier strike leader
Lech Walesa as a "committed Catholic and nationalist"
who "has not the least in common with communism."
Thus, while Trotskyists could and did wholeheartedly
support the 1956 Hun-
garian Revolution, in
Poland today we must
warn that the workers
movement — especially
the new "self-governing
trade unions" — could
become subordinated to
the reactionary Catholic
church and its imperial-
ist backers.

From
The YSL Right Wing

and the
"Crisis of World
Stalinism"

The Right Wing and "Democracy"

It is no accident that the key phrase in the analysis of the
Polish and Hungarian revolutions is "democracy" — not
continued on next page

12

SPARTACIST

"bourgeois democracy", not "workers democracy", not
even "peasant democracy", but plain, unqualified "democ-
racy", "democracy" in general. There may be some younger
members of the YSL who see nothing wrong with this
procedure. I advise all such comrades to study very
carefully the writings of Lenin on this subject, notably
"State and Revolution" and "Proletarian Revolution and
Renegade Kautsky." The key thought, absolutely basic to
the Marxist theory of the state, is that any form of
government in a class society, including a democracy,
essentially embodies the domination ("dictatorship") of
one class over the others. This is especially true of workers
democracy because the proletariat, inherently a property-
less class, cannot rule except directly and politically, i.e.,
through its own class organizations of the "soviet" type.
Any form of "pure" "classless" democracy "in general" can
only express the domination of the economically strongest
class, i.e., is necessarily bourgeois democracy.

These basic considerations are well known to the
members of the NAC [National Action Committee], and
presumably these comrades accept them, at least formally.
What the resolution does is simply to declare them
inapplicable to the revolution under Stalinism, in the
following way:

"What must be remembered is that 'under Stalinism, the
fight for democracy has a different social meaning than it
does under capitalism, so long as it is limited to general
democratic aims and demands no other change. Under
capitalism, such a struggle represents a struggle for
capitalist democracy. U nder Stalinism, where the means of
production are statified, the fight for democracy which
calls for no other changes, and hence seeks the democrati-
zation of statified property, becomes the revolution for
democratic socialism, even if it is not so consciously
expressed."

What we have here is a schematic formula, rigidified into
a fetish, used as a substitute for a concrete historical
analysis. The leaders of the YSL have for a long time relied
on the formula that Stalinism is not socialist because its
nationalized property is not accompanied by political
democracy. The obvious corollary to this is that national-
ized property plus political democracy is socialism. And
this is the theoretical essence of the quoted paragraph.

This is a good example of the dangers inherent in an
agitational over-simplification. It's a lot easier and more
effective for us to talk about "democracy" as a prerequisite
for socialism than to use that nasty term "dictatorship of
the proletariat." In the case of the YSL right wing, this has
gone past a mere tactical adaptation of language and has
become an adaptation of thought. The struggle for
socialism under Stalinism ceases to be a struggle for workers
power, and becomes a struggle for "general democratic
aims."

The false, abstract, undialectical character of the
methodology of the NAC majority is exemplified by the
proposition that the struggle against Stalinism is the
struggle for socialism "so long as it is limited to general
democratic aims and demands no other change." But of
course the reality of the revolution in Eastern Europe is not
that of pure democracy and "no other change." A huge
number of economic and social changes which are not
necessarily those flowing from "general democratic aims"
are the inseparable accompaniment to the popular
revolution against Stalinism: to cite only the one change
referred to by the resolution, the peasants have spontane-

Jean-Claude Latt^s

Horthyite Cardinal Mindszenty, U.S. imperialism's
agent for counterrevolution in Hungary.

ously eliminated collectivized agriculture, and restored
private property on the land. It is exactly these changes that
determine the actual character of the revolution against
Stalinism, not an abstract formula about the relation of
"democracy" to "socialism."

The formula nationalized property in industry plus
political democracy equals socialism is not even true on an
abstract level, no matter how useful agitationally. If it was
true, Austria and Burma, both of whose industry is largely
nationalized, and both of whom have relatively democratic
political structures, would be socialist states. The essential
prerequisite for development toward socialism is the
raising of the working class to the position of a ruling class,
or, in precise scientific terms, the establishment of the
proletarian dictatorship.

Would the struggle for "general democratic aims" under
Stalinism be sufficient to raise the working class to the level
of a ruling class? The NAC resolution answers in the

affirmative, on the basis of its formula A real answer,

however, must rest on a concrete analysis of the Polish and
Hungarian revolutions.

"Democracy" and Capitalist Restoration

The key question is this: theoretically, was it possible for
the Polish and Hungarian revolutions to result in the
restoration of capitalism? The NAC draft resolution
precludes this, since it states that "democracy" is sufficient
to define "the revolution for democratic socialism." This
view, in my opinion, is possible only on the basis of a
singular ignorance of the actual social and economic forces
determining the evolution of Poland and Hungary, and the
world context in which these revolutions took place.

What would have been the development in Poland or
Hungary if the revolution had in fact achieved the
establishment of formal democracy, of the Western type,
with "no other change?" We here must abstract from the
actual level of socialist consciousness attained by the Polish
and Hungarian workers, since this is not a determining

AUTUMN 1980

13

factor in the argument of the NAC resolution. It should,
however, be made clear that I believe this level of socialist
consciousness was the decisive factor in the whole
development, the key to the future of these countries.

The establishment of formal democracy, if it means
anything at all, means free elections to a sovereign
parliament. Free elections, in turn would mean the
establishment 6f a government reflecting the numerically
largest section of the population. In Poland and Hungary
this majority is not the working class. It is the petty-
bourgeoisie of town and country, the peasants, small
shopkeepers, artisans, and the old middle classes.

Could free elections in Poland or Hungary result in fact
in a government representing this petty-bourgeois majori-
ty? A majority cannot express its rule unless it is organized.
Could this majority have been organized?

Here we come to one of the most shocking features of the
NAC draft resolution. The authors of the draft have made
the most stupid omission possible in a resolution on Poland
and Hungary: there is no mention whatever of the Catholic
Church, either as a religious institution or as a social force!

Yet, in both Poland and Hungary the Church is the one
institution to emerge full blown from the Stalinist regime,
with a highly organized and stable apparatus, a long
tradition of continuity, and a high degree of popular
prestige. The actual power of the Catholic Church is shown
by the enormous extent to which religious education was
reintroduced into the schools in Poland and Hungary
(particularly in Poland, there have been frequent reports of
the persecution of atheist and Jewish children by Catholic
majorities). The power of the Church was shown most
dramatically by Cardinal Wyszinski's intervention on
behalf of Gomulka at the time of the recent Polish
elections — an action which, according to all reports, played
a major part in saving the Gomulka regime from what
seemed likely to be a drastic setback. Can there be any
doubt that in really free elections the candidates endorsed
by the Church would have a huge advantage among the
Catholic majority?

What role does the Church desire to play in these
revolutions? The Draft Resolution states that in Poland
and Hungary "forces which advocate capitalist restoration
. . . were extremely small and carried no weight." It is true
that neither in Poland nor in Hungary did the Church
present an openly capitalist program. But it is not necessary
for it to do so. The Catholic Church, by its very nature as an
international body completely controlled from the Vati-
can, plays a certain role in world politics — the role of an
important ally of U.S. imperialism and of capitalist
reaction in all countries. If it felt free to do so, what reason
is there to think that the Church headed by a Mindszenty
would act differently than does the Church in Italy, Spain,
or Austria? And if free elections should return a parliament
with a Catholic majority, reflecting the Catholic majority
in the countryside, wouldn't the Church feel free?

There seems to me to be a high degree of probability that
really free elections in both Poland and Hungary would
return a petty-bourgeois, clerical majority. Free elections
were never held in Poland after the war, but if they had
been held, few except the Stalinists have denied that they
would have been won by the Peasant Party of Mikolajczyk.
Free elections were held in Hungary, and they resulted in a
substantial majority for the Smallholders Party, led by the

clerical reactionaries Ferenc Nagy and Msgr. (!) Bela
Varga.

Would a government of Mindszenty-Ferenc Nagy or
Mikolajczyk-Wyszinski have been able to restore capital-
ism? It is here irrelevant to argue that no such governments
could, in fact, have been formed — because they obviously
could have been if the revolutions had remained within the
bounds of formal parliamentary democracy with full
democratic rights for all parties and individuals, including
clerics and emigres. The question at issue is precisely the
nature and role of such formal parliamentary democracy in
East Europe — remember that the draft resolution consid-
ers this "democracy" equivalent to socialism.

I believe that a petty-bourgeois government in either
Poland or Hungary, if allowed to stabilize itself and get a
firm grip on the country, would be able to bring about a
return to capitalism, and in very short order. The first step
would be the absolutely necessary one, for any non-
Stalinist government, of restoring capitalist relationships
in agriculture and small production and retail trade. The
NEP in Russia continually tended to develop restorationist
tendencies, epitomized in the rise of the kulaks and
Nepmen. Bukharin's policy of concessions to these
capitalist elements would in fact have brought about this
sort of capitalist restoration despite the subjective desire of
the Bolshevik right wing to prevent it. NEP in a backward
and exhausted country is a dangerous business at best — if
placed in the hands of the political representatives of the
kulaks and Nepmen (and the peasant and petty-bourgeois
parties could be nothing else) it would certainly lead
straight to capitalism.

Another decisive aspect of the return to capitalism under
petty-bourgeois democratic leadership would be the ties of
Poland and Hungary with the capitalist world market,
most important, of course, with the gigantic economic
strength of U.S. imperialism. It is no secret that the main
positive political program of U.S. imperialism toward East
Europe is based on massive economic aid, in the form of
"loans" and outright gifts. This "aid" would have a dual
effect: it would be a political ace of trumps in the hands of
the bourgeois politicians who alone would have access to
the American largess, and it would very rapidly serve to
reorient the economies of Poland and Hungary back to
their traditional dependence on Western capitalism. Lenin
once remarked that he was far less afraid of the White
Guard armies than of the cheap Western commodities they
brought in their train. American commodities entering
Eastern Europe under petty-bourgeois governments would
not merely be cheap — they would be free!

And what would become of the nationalized industries?
Their fate would serve the interests of the peasants and
petty-bourgeoisie and the needs for trade with the Western
capitalists. Hungary and Poland can be capitalist states
without denationalizing a single large industrial plant; all
that is necessary is to convert the industry, democratically
of course, into an appendage of the peasant economy and
the world economy.

What does this mean? An orientation entirely to
consumer goods production, for the benefit of the
peasants. A cessation of new investment and even repairs,
since this would divert resources away from the petty-
bourgeois sector. Abandonment of industries that could
not compete on the world market — why should a Polish
continued on next page

14

SPARTACIST

shopkeeper pay twice as much for a Zeran car as for a
superior Volkswagen? Such investment and modernization
as takes place to be financed by private Western capital, at
^no cost to the national economy.

And the consequences of this for the workers? Wages
kept low, to keep down the cost of production. Workers
councils would naturally not be allowed to interfere with
the decisions of the democratic majority on questions
concerning the management of the economy. The present
grossly overexpanded work force would be sharply
reduced as an obvious rationalization measure. And of
course, the workers representatives would not hold power
in the government and parliament; after all, in a
democracy, doesn't the majority rule?

We should here re-emphasize that the above is not a
picture of what I believe to have been the real perspective
before Hungary and Poland, the real class nature of these
revolutions. It is a picture of a real possibility of the
evolution of these countries, if the workers had restricted
themselves to "general democratic aims." The essential
thing that it shows is that it is completely false to argue that
the establishment of parliamentary democracy is sufficient
to convert a Stalinist state into a Socialist one. Under
Stalinism as under capitalism, there is no such thing as
democracy in general; there is proletarian democracy, and
there is bourgeois democracy. Nothing else. The "classless"
parliamentary forms of democracy, in a country with a
peasant and petty-bourgeois majority, represent bourgeois
democracy.

The Socialist Alternative

If a formal and parliamentary democracy was likely to
lead to a petty-bourgeois government and the restoration
of capitalism in Poland and Hungary, what should have
been the socialist alternative to these "general democratic
aims?" The answer was given by the Russian Revolution,
which also took place in a backward country in which free
parliamentary elections would have necessarily resulted in
a restoration of capitalism. That answer is the establish-
ment of the state power of the working class.

In Hungary this solution was indicated perfectly by the
course of the revolution itself, in which the decisive organs
of revolutionary struggle were the workers councils. These
councils were created in the course of the struggle by the
spontaneous action of the workers themselves, and quickly
proved themselves to be the political leadership of the
entire nation.

The workers council or soviet represents the indicated
form for the establishment of workers power in Hungary
and, with slight difference of form, in every other country.
In a country like Hungary, the creation of councils of
working peasants, peasant Soviets, would provide a means
whereby the peasant majority could be represented in the
government while preserving the state power of the
proletariat through its class institutions. In scientific
terminology, the state emerging from the revolution would
be a workers state; the government would be a workers and
farmers government.

Of course the mere establishment of a republic of
workers councils in Poland or Hungary does not guarantee
these countries against capitalist restoration. The proletari-
an regimes in East Europe would immediately be faced by
the same sort of problems which beset the first soviet

republic under NEP, and, if the revolution should fail to
extend itself to the advanced countries of Western Europe,
these states too would degenerate and eventually collapse.
What the workers republic would guarantee is the
opportunity of the working class at every point to impose
its own conscious socialist direction on the nation.

It niay be that some comrades who have never read
Lenin or forgotten what they once learned will claim that
this is "undemocratic", because a soviet type of state would
mean the rule of a minority, the working class, over the
majority of the population, mainly peasants. In reply to
this objection, we point out the following basic facts:

1. ) The peasantry, even where it is in the majority, is
incapable of ruling in its own name. As a stratum of small
commodity producers, i.e., a petty-bourgeois class, it tends
to follow behind its natural leaders, the petty-bourgeois
and "middle class" elements in the cities. In East Europe,
this has been and is concretely expressed in the allegiance of
the peasantry to the Catholic hierarchy. A government
"representing" the East European peasantry would be
dominated by clerical and pro-capitalist forces, which not
only are a much smaller minority than the proletariat, but
are of course a reactionary, inherently anti-democratic
minority as well.

2. ) The state of a soviet type, in terms of the actual rights
and powers enjoyed by the masses of the people, including
the poor peasants, is infinitely more democratic than the
most democratic bourgeois republic, freely-elected parlia-
ment and all.

3. ) In the actual revolution, the working class was the
undisputed leader of the entire nation, and was the sole
social force capable of an all-out struggle to overthrow the
Stalinist bureaucracy. This fact gives it the highest
democratic right to establish its own state. Historical
experience shows that the working class is able to win
support from large sections of the petty-bourgeoisie and
peasantry only when it shows them that it is capable of
acting to solve the problems of the entire society in a
revolutionary fashion on its own, trusting only to its own
class forces.

The question naturally arises: if the Russian counter-
revolutionary intervention had not taken place, would the
Hungarian revolution have, in fact, resulted in a republic of
workers councils? Of course, we cannot answer this
question definitively. But certain clear facts about the
objective and subjective aspects of the Hungarian revolu-
tion indicate that an affirmative answer was highly
probable.

The first and decisive thing about the Hungarian
revolution is that it was a workers revolution, and the
leading role of the workers was institutionally formulated
by the establishment of workers councils. Except for the
Russian army, there was in Hungary not the shadow of a
social force capable of preventing the assumption of state
power by the workers councils. Thus the objective
conditions for the formation of a soviet republic, in the
event of revolutionary victory of course, were entirely
favorable.

The actual level of consciousness of the Hungarian
workers, however, was not at the level indicated by the
objective possibilities of the revolution. In this the
Hungarian workers were like the Russian proletariat after
the February revolution. The general demand was not for
all power to the workers councils, but for "free elections" to

AUTUMN 1980

15

True face of Catholic reaction: Franco's troops
occupy revolutionary Barcelona, 1939.

the strength of bourgeois-democratic and even pro-western
illusions among the workers. These illusions were the
inevitable product of the situation of the Hungarian
working class, of its experiences under the Stalinist
dictatorship. They could be overcome only in the course of
open political struggle after the destruction of the Stalinist
regime. To do this, to raise its consciousness to a higher
level, the Hungarian working class would have had to
absorb the experience of a century of revolutionary
socialist struggles, and most of all the experience of the last
half-century of Marxist political thought, the body of
theory developed best of all by Lenin and Trotsky.

For the Hungarian working class to learn these lessons
would have been, at the same time, for it to construct a
revolutionary Marxist party capable of leading the
proletariat to the consolidation of its own power. Failure to
reach this new level of class consciousness, failure to create
a bolshevik party, would have meant that the working class
would, sooner or later, let the state power slip out of its
fingers and into the hands of the "democratic" majority
representing the petty-bourgeoisie and the Church.

*****

From"

"Truth" and Hungary — A Reply
to Herbert Aptheker

The Hungarian working class was the central actor in the
Hungarian drama — and the working class is totally
omitted from Aptheker's version of the "truth" about
Hungary! More exactly, Aptheker mentions the workers
only to deny that they played any role. He asserts: "the
workers of Budapest by and large adopted an apathetic or
passive or neutral attitude."

It is surely not necessary to recapitulate here the great
number of eyewitness accounts proving that the main
fighting forces were made up of young workers, that the
heaviest fighting took place in the working class districts
(like Kobanya, Ujpest, — and "Red Csepel," the proletari-
an stronghold of Hungarian Communism and the last ^
center of resistance against the second Russian interven-
tion). It should be enough to cite the curious manner the
Hungarian workers chose to show their "neutrality" — a
complete general strike and the formation of Workers
Councils!

The sequel to the second Russian intervention showed
the real nature and strength of the contending social forces
in Hungary so clearly as to remove any possible doubt on
this score .... The fascistic groups vanished into thin air (or
rather, into Austria and thence other countries of the "free
world," to prepare for new adventures). Mindszenty hid in
the United States embassy. [Smallholders Party leader]
Bela Kovacs was invited to join the Kadar government, but
refused and announced his "retirement" from politics. But
the workers councils remained and carried on a fierce
struggle against the Russian occupier and its Kadar puppet
government. As late as December 12, all Hungary was
gripped by a general strike. In the end, as we know, the
Kadar government was able by the threat of starvation to
break the strike. It proceeded to arrest the workers' leaders
and destroy the Workers Councils, on the pretext that the
Councils "have preoccupied themselves with exclusively
political questions with the objective of organizing a sort of
continued on next page

a sovereign parliament.

It would, however, be a disastrous mistake to take the
level of consciousness corresponding to the struggle against
the Stalinist bureaucracy as the permanent and ultimate
political program of the Hungarian proletariat. The
Hungarian workers wanted "free elections," but they also
wanted to preserve their own councils and extend their
powers. They wanted to move forward to socialism, not
backward to capitalism.

If the revolution had been successful, the workers
councils would have emerged with the decisive aspects of
state power, de facto, in their hands. They would not be
likely to surrender this power to the petty-bourgeois and
clerical government resulting from "free elections." A state
of dual power between parliament and Soviets would tend
to emerge. In this the Hungarian workers would, in their
own way, be recapitulating the experience of the Russian
working class. In Russia, as we all should know, the
proletarian revolution was followed by free elections to a
constituent assembly, the most democratic type of
bourgeois parliament. Petty-bourgeois parties, of a far
more "leftist" type than would be found in the Hungary of
Mindszenty, dominated this constituent assembly. In
Russia, it took only a day to make clear to the workers
councils that they could not tolerate the existence of a
bourgeois government by their side. The Russian workers
acted in the right way; under the leadership of the
Bolshevik party of Lenin and Trotsky they dispersed the
parliament and made it clear to the entire world that the
Soviets were the only power in Russia. The Hungarian
workers would eventually be faced with the same problem,
and eventually would have to act in the same way, or see the
conquests of their revolution seized from them by the
restorationist elements.

The Need for a Revolutionary Party

The Russian workers were able to act as they did only
because of the presence of a revolutionary Marxist party,
capable of anticipating events, drawing the lessons of the
proletarian struggles, and taking, resolute revolutionary
action. In Hungary too, the establishment of the power of
the workers councils would require such a party. The
absence of a bolshevik party was one of the main causes for

16

SPARTACIST

second power, opposed to the State Power." [France-
Observateur, 3 January 1957]

The bitter irony of a self-styled "Revolutionary Workers
and Peasants Government" outlawing the only representa-
tive organs of the Hungarian working class should not
blind us to the fact that with this declaration the Kadar
government has definitively posed the real choice in
Hungary. On the one hand, the "State Power" of the
discredited Stalinist bureaucracy resting on Russian
bayonets; and on the other, the "second power," the state
power of the Hungarian working class exercised through
its elected democratic bodies, the Workers Councils. The
Hungarian Workers Councils of 1956 were the legitimate
heirs of the Workers Councils (Soviets) of 1919. Aptheker
thus is closer to the truth than he suspects when he claims
that the heirs of Horthy played a decisive role in the
Hungarian revolution!

The real spirit of the Hungarian workers revolution was
eloquently expressed by Sandor Racz, a young worker 23
years old, who was elected chairman of the Budapest
Central Workers Council. On December 8 Racz gave an
interview to the correspondent of an Italian newspaper, to
be published only if he was arrested. He declared:

"I have a tranquil conscience because I have been the
unfortunate spokesman for the will of the workers and for
all those who have fought for the idea! of a free,
independent, and neutral Hungary and for a socialist
state.... All that has been refused to us. The government
knows that the country is against it, and since it knows
today that the single organized force which truly made the
Revolution is the working class, it wishes to destroy the
workers united front."

— [// Giorno, 14 December 1956]

As he had anticipated, Racz was arrested the moment he
went to meet representatives of the Kadar government,
who had promised to negotiate with the workers. . . .

One of the most unfortunate aspects of Aptheker's book
is that its preoccupation with a fictitious "White Terror"
prevents us from coming to grips with the real restoration-
ist danger. I earlier referred to the universally-held
capitalist view that the Hungarian revolution was aimed at
achieving "Western-style democracy." A brief discussion of
this is necessary here.

The claim that the Hungarian revolution oriented
toward "Western-style democracy" was more than a

theory; it was a political program. The leaders of the
"West" knew as well as the Russians that it would be
impossible to impose a new Horthy on the Hungarian
people. Therefore, capitalism could be restored in Hungary
only in "democratic" guise. Certain aspects of Hungarian
society make this more than a Utopian dream.

A majority of the population of Hungary is rural,
attached to private property (Stalinist "collectivizations"
did not exactly weaken this attachment), and economically
drawn to the West. Furthermore, the religious majority in
Hungary is Catholic. The planners of "Liberation" had
good grounds to hope that the establishment of a Western-
style parliamentary system would result in a government
reflecting these majorities, under the leadership of emigre
politicians and the Catholic hierarchy. Especially since they
had powerful extra-democratic means of pressure, in the
form of economic "aid" and the activities of the fascistic
fringe we met earlier.

Could capitalism have been restored in this way?
Certainly if the Hungarian revolution had been allowed to
develop freely, there is a possibility that this would have
happened. (Of course, even if this development were
certain, which is not at all the case, the actual Russian
intervention would still be an impermissible denial to the
Hungarian people of the right to choose their own social
system.)

The danger of capitalist restoration thus really existed.
But nothing at all justifies the Western claim that the
revolution was essentially a struggle for the "democratic"
return of "peoples capitalism." The Western version of the
"counter-revolution" thesis, like the Stalinist one, is false
because it ignores the key factor in the revolution — the
working class.

The Hungarian working class, even though it may have
been confused about many things, did not fight for
"Western-style" democracy — it fought for socialist democ-
racy. The workers of Gyor showed this when they
suppressed the meeting in favor of [the right-wing emigre]
Ferenc Nagy. The workers council of the 1 1th District of
Budapest showed this when it demanded "free elections in
which only those parties may participate that recognize and
have always recognized the Socialist order, based on the
principle that means of production belong to society."
[quoted in Free Europe Committee, Revolt in Hungary —
A Documentary Chronology of Events (1956)]

But the decisive refutation of the idea that Hungary was
returning to "Western-style democracy" is the simple fact
that the workers all over Hungary, in the heat of the
revolution, created their own Workers Councils as organs
of the political rule of the working class. What has this to
do with capitalist "democracy"? To smash the threat of
capitalist restoration, the Hungarian workers would
merely have had to exert the power that already lay in their
hands, to give all power to the workers councils and not, as
in so many past revolutions, give up their power to a
capitalist parliament.

To grasp the loathsome hypocrisy and mendacity of the
capitalist "friends" of the Hungarian revolution, the reader
need only ask this question: What would be the attitude of
these DuUeses, Mollets, and Edens if the workers of Paris,
London, or Detroit were to form their own workers
councils and attempt to establish a "Socialist order, based
on the principle that means of production belong to
society"? ■

AUTUMN 1980

17

Revisionists on the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

Eurotrotskyist Mandel vs.
Caudillo Moreno

With Carter's renewed Cold War offensive, we are once
again bombarded with the rhetoric of "the free world
versus Soviet totalitarianism." And certainly one of
Stalinism's greatest services for the imperialist bourgeoisie
has been the identification of Marxian socialism with a
gray, bureaucratic police state. The brutal terror, crushing
censorship and ludicrous frame-ups have dragged the
liberating goals of Marxism through the mud. Every day
the working people of the United States and West Europe
have had pounded into them that they enjoy greater
freedom under capitalist democracy than under the Soviet
bloc's dictatorship of the proletariat.

The various "Trotskyist" revisionists have expectedly
capitulated to the intense and growing anti-Communist
ideological campaign in the imperiahst West. They have
used Trotsky's revolutionary opposition to Stalinist
bureaucratic rule as a cover for an essentially social-
democratic rejection of the proletarian dictatorship. This is
precisely the function of the main resolution, "Socialist
Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,"
adopted by ihe majority tendency of Ernest Mandel's
United Secretariat (USec) at its 11th World Congress in
November of last year.

This document gives to the "dictatorship of the
proletariat" a purely bourgeois-democratic content.
Behind its for-the-ages abstractness, "Socialist Democracy
..." is a sustained polemic for granting to pro-imperialist
forces within the Soviet bloc fiill political rights, including
the right to win governmental power. In a defense of this
document, Mandel, perhaps prophetically, explicitly
comes out for the legalization of a Roman Catholic party in
Poland, a clerical-nationalist party inspired by pope
Wojtyla and Zbigniew Brzezinski! "Socialist Democracy
..." is nothing but an echo of Carter's anti-Soviet "human
rights" campaign refracted through the Eurocommunist/
social-democratic milieu.

When Mandel's draft of "Socialist Democracy..." first
came out in 1977, the American Socialist Workers Party
(SWP) expressed general agreement with it, while the
political adventurer Nahuel Moreno used it as a foil to pose
as a leftist "anti-revisionist." However, at the 11th World
Congress, after the Morenoite Bolshevik Faction had
split, the SWP put up a counterresolution, "Socialism and
Democracy" {1979 World Congress of the Fourth
International [January 1980]).

The SWP is thoroughly reformist on its American
terrain and prostitutes Marxism in the service of liberalism.
While the inveterate impressionist Mandel tends to ride all
the way on his latest hobbyhorse — not so long ago
Guervarist guerrillaism, most recently Eurocommunism —
the SWP sometimes tries to be less flagrantly revisionist in
its formal, international documents.

"Socialism and Democracy" has the same key

formulation as do the Mandelites: "... the workers must be
free to organize groups, tendencies and parties without a
priori ideological restrictions." Presumably then a prole-
tarian political revolution in the USSR would enable a
Sakharov or a Solzhenitsyn to contest for soviet delegate.
Basically the SWP's "Socialism and Democracy" carefully
avoids clearly stated positions on the central controversial
issues. The adopted USec majority resolution explicitly
states that pro-bourgeois parties, even if they support
(though not yet violently) imperialist governments, should
have the same political rights as proletarian socialist
parties. That is the long and the short of it. The SWP
document implicitly accepts this position, but doesn't
express it so bluntly.

In one sense the Mandelite/SWP ultra-liberal
pronouncements about socialist democracy are baloney.
When they find it opportune to cheerlead for one or
another Stalinist regime, these revisionists will defend the
suppression not of pro-bourgeois tendencies, but of left
oppositional groups, including their own "comrades." In
the early 1950s Pablo, Mandel & Co. apologized for the
Mao regime's imprisonment of the veteran Chinese
Trotskyists, contemptuously dismissing them as "refugees
from revolution." A decade later the Pabloites, now joined
by the SWP, covered up and defended the Castro regime's
persecution of the Cuban Trotskyists (followers of Juan
Posadas), whose printing press was smashed for bringing
out Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed]

Recently these most democratic of "socialist democrats"
have gone even further. In Nicaragua they have defended
the suppression of the left not by a Stahnist regime of a
deformed workers state (bad enough), but by the petty-
bourgeois bonapartist government of a capitalist country!
The petty-bourgeois radical Sandinista/bourgeois coali-
tion in Managua imprisoned and expelled the followers of
Nahuel Moreno and various Maoists, mainly for agitating
the workers. The Mandelites apologized for the Sandinista
crackdown, while the SWP actually endorsed and may
even have inspired it! In a small-time way the Mandelites/
SWP have demonstrated once again that the defenders of
"democratic rights" for Hindenberg and Ludendorff will be
lawyers for the murderers of Luxemburg and Liebknecht.

The difference between the SWP and Mandelites at the
1 1th World Congress was incidental friction. Moreno, on
the other hand, used Mandel's social-democratism as the
central rationale for an oppositional faction. Having spent
most of his political career as a deep entrist in the Peronist
movement, Moreno represents that tendency of ostensible
Trotskyism closest to populist-nationalist bonapartism.
Exiled from Argentina by the 1975 rightist coup, he
adopted a new persona as the dynamic jefe of world
Trotskyism. With the Mandelites tailing the Eurocommu-
continued on next page

18

SPARTACIST

nists and the SWP as usual tailing the liberals, Moreno
decided a "left" oppositional posture would be
advantageous.

But the Morenoites' "hard Bolshie" pose was as much a
sham as the Mandelite/SWP ultra-democratism. On
splitting from the USec last fall the Morenoites immediate-
ly blocked with Pierre Lambert's Organisation Commu-
niste Internationaliste (OCI), which is to the right not only
of the Mandelites but even of the Eurocommunists. The
neo-Kautskyan and virulently Stalinophobic OCI has
embraced the pro-Western Soviet-bloc dissidents even
more fulsomely than has the USec. And raising the banner
of anti-Soviet nationalism in imperialist Europe, the
Lambertists call for the unconditional reunification of
Germany through "a national constituent assembly East
and West," a demand presumably adopted from the late
Konrad Adenauer!

Mandel's ultra-democratism and Moreno's rev-
olutionary Third Worldist bonapartism are each in their
own way poses which can be dropped or even reversed
tomorrow. Nonetheless, it is important to innoculate
would-be revolutionaries against these symmetric revision-
isms of the Marxist program of the dictatorship of the
proletariat.

The Revolutionary Purpose of the
Proletarian Dictatorship

"...if our purpose is the abolition of private property in
the means of production, the only road to its solution lies
through the concentration of State power in its entirety in
the hands of the proletariat, and the setting up for the
transitional period of an exceptional regime — a regime in
which the ruling class is guided, not by general principles
calculated for a prolonged period, but by considerations of
revolutionary policy." [our emphasis]

— Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism
(1920)

This passage draws the fundamental line of demarcation
between Bolshevism and the "democracy above all"
revisionists from Kautsky to Mandel.

The proletarian revolution certainly liberates the
creative political energies of the working masses and
provides them with far greater real democratic rights and
freedoms than they have under bourgeois parliamentarism.
Without the active participation of the great majority of the
population in political life, the transition to communism —
where classes have disappeared and the state has withered
away — is inconceivable. Nonetheless, workers democracy
is a means to an end, not an end in itself. That end is the
creation of the political, economic and cuUural precondi-

tions for communist society. The most fundamental of
these preconditions is the maintenance of proletarian state
power and collectivized property. Therefore, the forms and
extent of workers democracy are subordinate to the
defense of proletarian class rule against the forces of
bourgeois counterrevolution.

At this point the "pure democrats" pretending to be
Marxists will argue that there can be no contradiction
between granting bourgeois parties full democratic rights
and preventing them from restoring capitalism. They will
even argue that such democratic rights will expose the
bourgeois forces before potential followers and so
demoralize them. For the "pure democracy" revisionists
the bourgeoisie, after it has been overthrown and
expropriated, is reduced to either putschism or a harmless,
quixotic ideological opposition.

Mandel's "Socialist Democracv . . . " projects the
complete impotence of a bourgeois opposition as a
rationale for granting it "freedom of political organiza-
tion":

"The workers have no need to fear as a mortal danger
propaganda that 'incites' them to give the factories and
banks back to private owners. There is little chance that a
majority of them will be 'persuaded' by propaganda of that
type."

Lenin's answer to this kind of argument in his The
Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade A^au/5^>'(1918)
expresses a fundamental difference between revolutionary
Marxism and social-democratic revisionism:

"... in every profound revolution, the prolonged, stubborn
and desperate resistance of the exploiters, who for a
number of years retain important practical advantages
over the exploited, is the rule." [emphasis in original]

Among these advantages Lenin lists superior education,
managerial capacity, close connections with the higher
technical personnel and incomparably greater experience
in the art of war. He also points out that "a section of the
exploited from the least advanced middle-peasant, artisan
and similar groups of the population may, and indeed does,
follow the exploiters." And furthermore:

"If the exploiters are defeated in one country only — and
this, of course, is typical, since a simultaneous revolution
in a number of countries is a rare exception — they still
remain stronger than the exploited, for the international
connections of the exploiters is enormous." [emphasis in
original]

Lenin's reference to the international connections of the
bourgeoisie particularly highlights the revisionism of

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AUTUMN 1980

19

Moreno's
first

"revolu-
tionary"
mentor,
Juan
Peron;

Mandel's "Socialist Democracy and the Dictatorship of the
Proletariat." Central to this document is a fundamental
distinction between the exceptional condition of civil war
and the supposedly normal, peaceful state of the proletari-
an dictatorship:

"... the consolidation of the dictatorship of the proletariat
can be preceded by civil war or foreign military
intervention, i.e., attempts by the former ruling classes and
their international allies to overthrow workers power by
force. Under such conditions, the rules of war apply.
Restrictions on the political activities of the bourgeoisie
may well be called for."

But for Mandel this can only be for the moment. In his
reply to Moreno he ridicules the idea of "decades of civil
war."

What a profoundly nationalistic view of proletarian
revolution! We are here literally presented with the
program of building "socialist democracy in one country"
undisturbed and unconcerned by revolutions, civil wars
and wars in the rest of the world. This is, of course,
precisely the program of liberal Stalinism/
Eurocommunism, of the Dubceks and Berlinguers.

While the imperialist bourgeoisie are not inverted
Trotskyists, they instinctively understand that the key to
restoring capitalism in the Soviet bloc (whether or not
bureaucratically ruled) is isolating it or, to use an early
Cold War term, "containing" it. The forces for capitalist
restoration in the Soviet Union and East Europe arise from
the interaction of imperialist pressure, economic and
military, from without and potentially counterrevolution-
ary social groupings from within — liberal intellectuals of
the Sakharov type, the church, a section of the Stalinist
bureaucracy.

The Polish social democrat Jacek Kuron, who is lionized
by the USec, calls for the Finlandizationof his country and
by extension all of East Europe:

"We must strive for a status similar to Finland's: a
parliamentary democracy with a limited independence in
the field of foreign policy where it directly touches the
interests of the USSR."

—"The Political Opposition and the Threat of
Intervention from Without" in Jiri Pelikan and
Manfred Wilke, eds., Menschenrechte: Ein
Jahrbuch zu Osieuropa {\971)

And when the Soviet army is now battling U.S. -backed
feudalist reactionaries in Afghanistan, Andrei Sakharov
calls on the United Nations (that den of imperialist thieves
and their colonial victims) to pressure the Soviet govern-

ment into withdrawing.

According to Mandel, pro-bourgeois groupings in a
workers state have an inalienable right to call on
international capital to use economic blackmail (as do
Sakharov and Polish social democrat Adam Michnik, for
example), to vocally support imperialist military buildups
and interventions in backward countries and to agitate
against aid to revolutions abroad (for example, to North
Vietnam and the Vietcong fighting the United States). In
other words, he advocates giving capitalist restorationist
forces the fullest freedom of agitation and organization
short of actual recourse to terrorism or armed insurrection.
Any government of a workers state which followed such an
ultra-liberal policy would insure that bourgeois counter-
revolutionary forces were maximally prepared when they
did risk insurrection.

To be sure, a revolutionary workers government would
not deal with reactionary, pro-bourgeois tendencies as the
Stalinist bureaucracy usually does. While the Stalinists can
only combat such oppositionists through state terror, a
revolutionary regime would have at its disposal a far more
effective weapon: moral authority before the working
masses and the perspective of world revolution.

In defending himself against Moreno's charges of
revisionism, Mandel resorts to a highly selective citation of
the Transitional Program. He bases his entire case on this
one passage:

"Democratization of the Soviets is impossible without
legalization of soviet parties. The workers and peasants by
their own free vote will indicate what parties they
recognize as soviet parties." [emphasis in original]

Mandel latches onto the second sentence to argue for the
legalization of all, including bourgeois-restorationist,
parties. He projects that soviet democracy will encompass
not only the social democrats and Stalinists, but also
bourgeois-nationalists such as the Peronists in Argentina,
PRI in Mexico, Congress Party in India, etc. ("First
Comments on Nahuel Moreno's 'The Revolutionary
Dictatorship of the Proletariat'," [SWP] International
Internal Discussion Bulletin Vol. XVI No. 9, October
1979).

Trotsky was extremely precise in formulating the
Transitional Program. Why did he call for the legalization
continued on next page

Pro-Western dissident Andrei Sakharov waves letter
from Jimmy Carter.

20

SPARTACIST

of "soviet" parties, not of all parties? Mandel chooses to
interpret Trotsky's formulation as a meaningless tautolo-
gy. For Mandel a soviet party is any party elected to the
soviet. Moreover, since one cannot tell in advance which
parties the workers and peasants will elect, any party that
contests for soviet office is ipso facto a soviet party.
Presumably if the fascists find it tactically expedient to run
for soviet delegateship, the Mandelites would have to
defend their legal right to do so.

Fortunately, to understand Trotsky's position, one is not
reduced to logical inference. Mandel carefully omits the
immediately preceding passage. Let us see why:

"It is necessary to return to the Soviets not only their free
democratic form but also their class content. As once the
bourgeoisie and kulaks were not permitted to enter the
Soviets, so now // is necessary to drive the bureaucracy and
the new aristocracy out of the Soviets. In the Soviets there is
room only for representatives of the workers, rank-and-
file collective farmers, peasants and Red Army men."
[emphasis in original]

Mandel now stands stark naked in his revisionism and
no amount of terminological trickery can hide it. Trotsky
not only regarded the exclusion of the bourgeoisie from the
Soviets as a matter of course, but also called for the
expulsion of the Stalinist bureaucrats, who in part stand
within the workers movement.

To summarize: soviet democracy should encompass
those parties, chosen by the workers and their petty-
bourgeois allies, which stand for and defend the socialist
order. As a norm all groupings which do not actively work
to overthrow the socialist revolution should have freedom
of expression, which is not the same as the right to form
soviet parties. How to deal with counterrevolutionary
groupings is a tactical question to be determined by such
factors as their particular nature and following, the
international situation, etc.

Enter El Caudillo Moreno

Nahuel Moreno fancies himself the Lenin of today and
he no doubt considers The Revolutionary Dictatorship of
the Proletariat (Bogota, 1978) as the State and Revolution
of today. This opus is presented both as a definitive attack
on present-day revisionism (using Mandel as a foil) and as a
grand strategy in the struggle for power.

The polemical exchange between Moreno and Mandel

Gorgoni/Contact

Mandel calls for legalization of a party led by pope
Wojtyla In Poland.

has an odd quality. It is as if, for some reason, Juan Per6n
and Enrico Berlinguer were debating political first
principles in Trotskyese. Both disputants are obviously
uncomfortable arguing within the Trotskyist framework
and resort to various improvisations, dodges and falsifica-
tions to break out of it.

Each is most effective making orthodox debating points
against the other's symmetric revisionism. Moreno cannot
be gainsaid when he asserts that the Mandelites/SWP have
"foisted onto the dictatorship of the proletariat objectives
and a program 90% similar to the Eurocommunist
program and diametrically opposed to that of our
teachers." In turn, Mandel condemns Moreno accurately
enough for opposing workers democracy in the name of the
uncontrolled rule of "the revolutionary party." He
characterizes Moreno's book as "strewn with theoretical
concessions to the [Stalinist] bureaucracy."

Actually Moreno expresses those elements of Stalinist
ideology which are common to nationalist bonapartism in
general. The adventurer-cauJ/Z/o polemicizes against the
Mandelite/SWP social-democratism not from the stand-
point of a Lenin or Trotsky (or even that of a Stalin), but
rather from that of a Juan Peron or Gamal Nasser.

Moreno devotes an entire section of his book to
attacking "soviet fetishism," hardly a major deviation in
the contemporary left. What Moreno is really opposing is
not a fixation with a particular form of proletarian
organization during an insurrection, but rather workers
democracy as such. He constantly counterposes "the
dictatorship of the revolutionary party" (that is, of Moreno
and his gang) to soviet democracy:

"... the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat in the
next decades will be synonymous not with soviet
organizations, but with revolutionary dictatorships of
Trotskyist parties or parties becoming Trotskyist [?]. . . .
"The revolutionary dictatorship of proletarian parties, not
soviet or multi-party soviet systems, is an objective
necessity imposed by social reality, the existence of
different sectors among the workers and toilers as well as
the low political and cultural level of the majority of these
sectors." [our emphasis]

Moreno's revisionism here is as blatant as Mandel's. The
Transitional Program considers "it would hardly be

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21

possible to think up a better" form of organization for
proletarian revolution and that "the slogan of Soviets,
therefore, crowns the program of transitional demands."

It is true that Trotsky on occasion criticized soviet
fetishism, for example, in his 1924 The Lessons of October.
But he always maintained: a) that if the revolution is not
organized on the basis of Soviets, it must be organized on
the basis of other inclusive proletarian organs (e.g., factory
committees, trade unions); and b) that in any case Soviets
would be established on the morrow of victory as the
governmental form of the proletarian dictatorship.

In one respect a consistent adventurer-bonapartist,
Moreno not only rejects soviet democracy in a workers
state, but proletarian organs per se as the basis for socialist
revolution. As an alternative to Soviets he offers the mass
corporatist institutions of various bourgeois-nationalist
regimes. For example, he maintains that at certain periods
in Argentina a proletarian revolution was possible on the
basis of the Peronist trade unions, semi-corporatist bodies
subordinated to a wing of the bourgeois office; corps.

In Iran today the Morenoites have gone even further and
call for "proletarian dictatorship" based on the Islamic
Revolutionary Committees (shoras), the "popular"
corporatist organs of a movement analogous to
European clerico-fascism in the 1930s! Their "vanguard"
Colombian section proclaims: "Our great task is to hold a
Congress of Shoras in the whole country!!! And it should
govern!" (International Supplement to El Socialista, 8
May 1980). In fact, the actual politics underlying The
Revolutionary Dictatorship of the Proletariat is best
revealed by the Morenoites' attitude toward Khomeini's
Iran. While all the fake-Trotskyist groupings tailed the
mass Islamic mobilization, the Morenoites' infatuation
with Khomeini's regime went deeper and is more sinister.

What appeals to the Morenoite mentality about the
"Iranian Revolution" is precisely its o«//-democratic
character, precisely the faghi's (leader's) freedom from any

Down with Khomeini's Holy War Against
the Left in Iran

Iranian Fedayeen
in Search of a / ,'^"-».K,o„e
Progressive Clergy/ ^S^^^,,

Translated into / <Li

Persian from / -^j^t'^-^jj . I

Le Bolchevik No. ^8, / O -

July 1980. A
trenchant critique of
the Iranian left's
suicidal support to
the "Islamic
Revolution" in the
name of all-class
"anti-imperialist"
unity.

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form of representative government. The "Iranian Revolu-
tion" is what Khomeini says it is. How much the would-be
"Trotskyist Imam" from Argentina must envy this man his
charismatic power over the masses, his command of the
unquestioning loyalty of thousands of militant youth. Here
one recalls that Moreno's first "revolutionary" mentor,
Juan Peron, learned his politics in Mussolini's Italy,
though he applied it in the very different setting of a semi-
colonial country dominated by a landed oligarchy.

Der Spiegel

Morenoites call for a government based on Khomei-
niite Islamic Revolutionary committees in Iran.

Just as Moreno's criticism of soviet fetishism is but a
cover for his bonapartist conceptions, so his opposition to
Mandel's supposed European centeredness amounts to
unabashed Third Worldism. He maintains that the West
European (and North American) working classes are so
corrupted by the crumbs from the imperialists' table and by
bourgeois-democratic freedoms that they cannot become
revolutionary until reduced to the wretched state of, say,
the Chilean or Iranian masses:

"We archio-Trotskyists believe that objective reality will
destroy all the bourgeois-democratic expectations of the
masses, and that as long as objective reality has not yet
destroyed these expectations, no effort at demonstration
can succeed. As long as the European workers have not
experienced brutal economic crisis, annual inflation of 100
to 150%, the appearance of fascist bands, bonapartist and
fascist coups d'etat, their bourgeois-democratic illusions
will not disappear. No one and nothing can destroy them."

In other words, proletarian revolution in the advanced
capitalist countries has been objectively impossible for the
past three decades and continues to be so.

But this means that proletarian dictatorships can exist
only in backward countries besieged by the imperialist
powers, the very condition conducive to bureaucratic
degeneration/deformation. This is, in fact, the heart of
Moreno's theory. The Morenoites' profound contribution
to Marxist theory is "the two-stage dictatorship of the
proletariat." The first stage, which we are supposedly now
in, is defined by the dominance of capitalist-imperialism on
a world scale:

"As a result of the fact that the dictatorship of the
proletariat has been established in isolated and backward
countries, it will not have just a single stage, as the
continued on next page

22

SPARTACIST

founders of Marxism believed. Rather than simply the
stage of construction of socialism, today the dictatorship
of the proletariat has two clearly defined stages.
"What we are now seeing is the first stage, which is

characterized by the confrontation with imperialism "

— "Declaration and Platform of the [Morenoite]
Bolshevik Faction," [SWP] International
Internal Discussion Bulletin Vol. XVI, No.3,
July 1979

This is recognizably the ideological outlook of the
Stalinist bureaucracies as well as various Third World
nationalist regimes pretending to "Marxism-Leninism."
Stripped of its Utopian gloss the essential content of
"socialism in one country" is the impossibility of proletari-
an revolution in the imperialist centers for a lengthy and
indefinite period (to use the Morenoite term, "a stage").
The Stalinist bureaucracies see themselves confronting an
unshakable imperialist order for the foreseeable future and
so resort to defensive military measures and diplomatic
maneuvering (in practice, international class collabora-
tion). In turn, the permanent threat from the "enemies of
the socialist fatherland" serves as an ideological justifica-
tion for bonapartist rule.

We can now summarize the 300 pages of The
Revolutionary Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Moreno
and his gang, disguising their "Trotskyism," infiltrate the
mass corporatist institution of some bourgeois-nationalist
regime, like the Peronist trade unions. At some point they

take it over, while appealing to a section of the officer corps
in the name of "anti-imperialist" nationalism. The
unwashed masses are deemed too selfish, too short-sighted
to be democratically entrusted with the decades-long
defensive struggle against the imperialist powers. This
requires the "revolutionary dictatorship" of. . .a "Trotsky-
ist" caudillo.

This fantasy of a would-be Third World bonapartist, of
course, has nothing in common with the Trotskyist
permanent revolution. What separates Trotskyism from all
manner of reformism and petty-bourgeois radicalism is the
conviction that the overthrow of the world capitalist order
is possible in the present historic period. The failure of the
world revolution to date is not rooted in the objective
conditions of contemporary capitalism, such as the
division between economically advanced and backward
countries, but rather in the reformist-bureaucratic mislead-
ership of the working class.

The task of a revolutionary (Trotskyist) vanguard in a
workers state is to provide political/organizational
leadership (and possibly material/ military support) for
proletarian revolution internationally, centrally within the
imperialist powers. Soviet democracy is integral to the
international extension of the socialist revolution, inspir-
ing especially the workers of the advanced (bourgeois-
democratic) capitalist countries with a model of their self-
liberation and control over their own future. ■

LTd'l Fusion...

(continued fronf page 24)

to candidates of the workers parties in the popular front:
the bourgeois workers parties must break from their
bourgeois partners.

(5) The LTdT broke politically from the GBL in 1978, on
the basis of the struggle waged by the iSt against the
opportunist political and organizational conceptions of the
GBL. The iSt continued engaging the LTdT in clarifying
political discussions, and at the August 1979 iSt Interna-
tional Conference the document approved with the
agreement of the LTdT observers said in part with
reference to the LTdT:

"The comrades of the LTd'l have shown an inadequate
grasp of the methodology of Leninism on the importance

Lega

Trotskista

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supporting

Soviet

intervention

against the

Islamic

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uprising in

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to the working class of the fight to defend democratic
rights. This has led to disputes in the past . . . which must be
expected to resurface in new forms."

A concrete expression of this was demonstrated later on at
the Conference, during a discussion on the question of how
to apply the Transitional Program to concrete trade-union
struggles (the imminent bankruptcy of Chrysler). In that
discussion some of the LTdT leaders showed an inability to
comprehend revolutionary Marxism, which centered on a
semi-reformist approach to the question of nationaliza-
tions, under an ultra-left cover, and which was combined
with a parochial worldview.

After several months of discussions with the I.S.
[International Secretariat] of the iSt, a majprity of
comrades were convinced of the correctness of the iSt
position, formulated in articles in Workers Vanguard {Nos.
238 and 247). The SL slogan, "Whatever Chrysler's worth,
give it to the workers," is a powerful transitional demand
for the specific situation posing class action against the
sanctity of private property through such militant
measures as factory seizures. While expressing the real felt
needs of Chrysler workers, the slogan exposes the social
democrats whose "nationalization" slogan is a cover for
managing the capitalist economy "in the workers' interest"
by having taxpayers assume the burden of subsidizing
unprofitable enterprises.

In relation to the unprincipled behavior of some LTd'l
members when questioned by the police early this year, the
I.S. of the iSt wrote a letter pointing out that "when the LTI
was raided by the police and its members held for
interrogation, members of the LTI including comrade
Moreno collaborated in this violation of your democratic
rights. ... To have gratuitously engaged in a 'dialogue' with
the repressive organisms of the class enemy when you were

AUTUMN 1980

23

Neri/Liaison

Strategic core of Italian proletariat. Workers stril^e
giant Fiat plant in Turin.

not facing any charges brought against you and without
insisting on your legal rights — and especially to have
answered questions about the size and financial resources
of the LTI ! — shows criminal incomprehension of the most
basic questions of the capitalist state and the class line."

In April 1980, around this question of the elementary
conduct of a communist toward the state, a majority of the
LTd'I — through the decisive intervention of the I.S. of the
iSt — consolidated its programmatic agreement with the
iSt, passing a motion "to condemn the improper and
potentially terribly dangerous and destructive conduct of
the LTd'I members in the course of police interrogation,"
whilst a tiny clique led by Moreno decided to split from the
LTd'I and the iSt to pursue his Pabloite liquidationist
orientation toward a particularly backward section of the
Workers Autonomy, as shown by the support granted to
the Mao-Stalinist "Struggle Slate" in the June 1980
elections in Rome.

(6) The LTd'I and the iSt recognize the burning need for
Trotskyists today — particularly in the light of the USA/
NATO's drive toward war over the Soviet intervention in
Afghanistan, a progressive intervention that revolutionists
support, raising the slogans "Hail Red Army!" and
"Extend the gains of October to the Afghan peoples!" — to

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Strongly restate the principle of unconditional defense of
the USSR and the deformed workers states against
imperialism; ultimately this can be accomplished only be a
proletarian political revolution against the Stalinist
bureaucrats and by workers anti-capitalist revolutions in
the West.

(7) Left-wing terrorism is born out of petty-bourgeois
despair and lack of confidence in the ability of the
organized working class to make a successful proletarian
revolution; the Red Brigades share this despair and lack of
confidence, at the same time that they claim some kind of
ideological continuity with the Stalinist partisans' activities
in 1943-45 and in the post-war period. Trotskyists
categorically reject terrorism as a systematic political
methodology. As Trotsky said, terrorists are bureaucrats in
reverse. However, leftist terrorists believe that they are
acting to overthrow capitalism and revolutionists must
defend them against persecution by the bourgeois state for
attacks on symbolic targets or direct agents of the capitalist
system and call for freeing those militants imprisoned as a
result of such persecution. At the same time, Trotskyists
cannot defend those left-wing terrorists responsible for
indiscriminate terrorist attacks on the civilian population
or for terrorist attacks against other organizations on the
left, just as we condemn violence within the workers
movement.

The LTd'I and the iSt understand as Leninists the
importance to the working class of the fight to defend
democratic rights against every attempt by the bourgeois
state to attack them, either directly with its uniformed
goons or indirectly through the fascist gangs.

(8) Trotskyism has always been extremely weak in Italy,
and systematically discredited for the past 30 years by its
main "representative," Livio Maitan, in recent years with
the help of the reformist LSR, Italian satellite of the
Argentinian adventurer Nahuel Moreno. Thus, there is
little of a Trotskyist tradition in Italy and the groups
claiming to be Trotskyist are ^ ery weak: the far left is
dominated by the New Left-Maoist, workerist, spontaneist
and terrorist milieus. Thus, the LTd'I and the Italian far left
have no real common language, nor references to accepted
authorities and sources. At the same time, the accepted
practices and norms of the Italian workers movement are
Stalinist or Stalinist-derived, particularly the lack of a
proletarian internationalist conception. The political and
organizational development of the LTd'I as a Trotskyist
organization can take place only in opposition to and
through a critical reassessment of what is "generally
accepted practice" on the Italian left, including on the most
elementary level.

(9) The LTd'I is committed to recruiting Italian cadres
and producing regular publications in Italian, engaging the
centrist groups in political combat to regroup their best
elements around the Trotskyist program: in this way we
aim at establishing the Spartacist tendency in Italy as a
stable propaganda group capable of fighting for the banner
of Trotskyism and undertake exemplary work in selected
working-class centers, offering to the militant Italian
proletariat the road forward toward the building of the
revolutionary leadership it needs to struggle and win.

Forward to an Italian Marxist-Leninist-Trotskyist
Party! Forward to the Rebirth of the Fourth International!

6-7 August 1980, Milano

24

SPARTACIST

AUTUMN 1980

Italian LTd'l Joins
Spartacist Tendency

We reprint below the fusion declaration adopted by the
Lega Trotskista d'ltalia (LTd'l) and the international
Spartacist tendency (iSt) this summer which represents the
culmination of over five years of strenuous efforts by the
iSt to regroup a nucleus of cadre from the far left,
particularly the ostensibly Trotskyist groups, in Italy. For
the iSt the fusion with the LTdT implies a commitment of
significant resources to strengthen the LTdT to carry out
the political tasks before it.

The process of winning this small group of young
comrades included hard fights against the macho "star"
conception of leadership which dominates the Pabloite
groups on the far left, especially in Italy. Those who have
been unable or unwilling to translate formal political
agreement into practical understanding of Leninist norms,
for example on the woman question, have gone by the
wayside. In the greetings of the LTdT to the Sixth National
Conference of the SL/U.S. the comrades spoke of the
importance of collective leadership in the tradition of
Lenin and James P. Cannon:

"The fight to introduce Cannonism to Italy is essential for
us. if in every country there is a tendency to national
exceptionalism, this anti-Marxist attitude has always
found a particularly fertile ground in parochial Italy.
People should just ask themselves where else in the world is
there another tendency which takes its national origins as a
programmatic banner like the 'Italian left' does (i.e., the
Bordigists)."

In opposition to centrists of all stripes, the iSt insists that
the Trotskyist program is unitary — not merely the
summation of individual political positions. Through a
series of debates over programmatic questions such as
Chrysler, the LTd'l comrades learned that apparently
minor differences can have major political implications.
The LTd'l greetings highlighted the rejection of "anti-
imperialist" or "anti-fascist" rhetoric to conceal the class
question:

"Italian exceptionalism is also combined with a general-
ized anti-Americanism in the left, a reflection of a deeply
ingrained popular-frontist view according to which all
goes badly in this country because of its subordination to
American imperialism. Or 'if only Italy were really
independent!' is the rallying cry of all the 'anti-
imperialists.' They all stop where it is the elementary duty
for a communist to start: the main enemy of the Italian
working clas.s is the Italian bourgeoisie, and this is what
our organization stands for loud and clear. The main
enemy is at home!"

We look forward to the development of a fighting
revolutionary propaganda group in Italy.

(1) The international Spartacist tendency and the Lega
Trotskista d'ltalia agree to fuse — with the LTd'l becoming
the Italian sympathizing section of the iSt — on the basis of
the decisions of the first four Congresses of the Communist

International, of Trotsky's struggle in the Left Opposition
and for the Fourth International as codified in the
Transitional Program, whose essential conclusions as well
as its method retain their full validity today, and of the nine
points for international Trotskyist* regroupment of the iSt.

(2) Trotsky's Fourth International, the world party of
socialist revolution, was destroyed by Pabloite revisionism
in the period 195 1 -54, and the task of Trotskyists today is to
struggle for the rebirth of the Fourth International. We
reject the pretenses of the unprincipled blocs claiming to be
the Fourth International or to represent its political and
organizational continuity (USec, OCRFI, Parity Commit-
tee, etc.) We also reject the erroneous conception of a
"family of Trotskyism" according to which the solution to
the world crisis of revolutionary leadership is represented
by the reunification of the "world Trotskyist movement."
The main pusher of this conception is the anti-Spartacist
bloc that includes a British group (the WSL) whose main
leader is a scab (Alan Thornett), an Italian group which
supports the PCI's "Historic Compromise" (the GBL), and
a Chilean group that would like to repeat once again the
experience of the Popular Front led by Allende, which
opened the way for the bloody regime of Pinochet (the
LOB).

(3) The tactic of revolutionary regroupment —
necessarily involving splits and fusions — will play a central
role in the fight for the rebirth of the Fourth International,
as illustrated by the regroupment of the iSt with the
Trotskyist Faction of the WSL in 1978, of the SL/U.S. with
the Red Flag Union (a left-wing homosexual group) in
1977, and of the SL/B and the Leninist Faction of the WSL
in 1980. The need for a regroupment of the Trotskyists on
the basis of a principled programmatic agreement has been
illustrated also by the political differentiation which took
place in Italy between the positions of the iSt and the FMR
(1974-75), the GBL (1976-77) and Marcello Braccini (1975-
77), as well as by the experience of the struggle to win the
LTd'l to Trotskyism.

(4) The origins of the LTd'l lie in the expulsion of its
central elements from the GCR/LCR (Italian section of the
USec) as the result of their fight against the GCR's
capitulation to popular frontism in the 1976 Italian
elections. With Trotsky, the LTd'l and the iSt recognize the
decisive character of the issue of the popular front today as
in the 1930s. Revolutionists can give no electoral support to
bourgeois workers parties (Stalinists or social democrats)
tied to or who openly support an open or implicit popular
front, since participation in the popular front temporarily
suppresses the contradiction between the socialist aspira-
tions of the masses of those parties and the class-
collaborationist practice of their bureaucratic leaderships.
In elections, revolutionists call for conditional opposition

continued on page 22

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I.

Introduction

The expulsion of 60 "foreign Trotskyists" from Nicara-
gua by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN)
last August made headlines around the world. The
deportees (now numbering over 100) were leaders of the
Simon Bol^va^ Brigade, set up by Nahuel Moreno's
Bolshevik Faction of the misnamed "United Secretariat of
the Fourth International" (USec). So when the USec not
only failed to protest; but actually endorsed this repression
by a bourgeois government, it sent shock waves through
the clique-ridden parody of Trotsky's Fl (currently
preparing its "Eleventh World Congress"). Subsequent
revelations (see "Did Camejo Turn Them In? ^VNo. 242,
26 October 1979) that leaders of the American SWP may
have been complicit in getting their Morenoite "comrades"
deported (and tortured by the Panamanian police) can only
reinforce the momentum building towards split in the
USec.

These circumstances have contributed to lending
Moreno & Co. an image of militancy. Yet for years this
current has stood on the far right wing of world ostensible
Trotskyism. Here is the rnan who in Argentina in the early
'50s helped set up a Peronist "socialist" party — a left wing
of bourgeois populism. This is the one-and-only Moreno
who in the mid-1960s wrote that Castro's stillborn "OL AS
...is the only organizational vehicle for power" in Latin
America, yet in 1974 was backing the* murderous Peron
regime against left-wing guerrillas (whom it scandalously
referred to as a "mirror image" of the AAA and other ultra-
rightist terrorists). It is the self-same Nahuel Moreno (aka
Hugo Bressano) whose financial skulduggery is legendary

on the Latin American left: from allegedly running off with
money intended for Hugo Blanco's peasant organizing in
the '60s, to raising money for his Simon Bolivar Brigade
today by hawking worthless "Sandino Bonds."

Nahuel Moreno is a cynical quick-change artist whose
current political stands bear little (and often no) relation to
what went before and what will -come after. His "left"
postures are frequently lifted lock-stock-and-barrel from
other tendencies (including ourselves, such as his tardy
discovery of the"Eurotrotskyism" of Ernest Mandel et dl.y.
And his seeming orthodoxy on doctrinal questions is
combined with "tactical" betrayals so shameless that they
leave even the denizens of the USec swamp breathless. But
the man is dangerous.

At a time when the USec stabs its comrades in the back in
Nicaragua, even arranging theirexpulsion by the bourgeois
authorities, and leads Iranian militants to the slaughter at
the hands of Khomeini's clerical-feudalism, any honest
would-be Trotskyist will be searching for a revolutionary
answer to the treachery of Mandel and the SWP. And it is
our duty as revolutionists to warn the workers movement
against the fraud of Nahuel Moreno and his "Bolshevik
Faction." That is the purpose of this "Moreno Truth Kit."

Be forewarned — this man is a cynical adventurer,
political chameleon and financial swindler! And note also
that it has been the international Spartacist tendency that
has consistently exposed Moreno & Co. while pointing the
way forward to the rebirth of an authentically Trotskyist
Fourth international.

Nahuel Moreno (left) and documents distributed by "Simon
Bolivar Brigade" boasting of subordination to FSLN.

3

excerpted from:

"Revolution
in

Nicaragua
and tlie Left

99

—Workers Vanguard,

No. 240, 28 September 1979

SEPTEMBER 24— It took 18 months
oi bitter straggle, including two insur-
rections totaling eleven weeks of the
bloodiest fighting, before they drove out
the hyena of Managua. Almost 50,000
died out of a population of 2.3 million,
and today the cities are in ruins, the
surviving population on the brink of
starvation, three quarters of the work-
force unemployed. Those who have
sacrificed so much are burning to root
out every trace of the hated dynasty
which bled the country dry. Laying
claim to what is rightfully theirs, the
Nicaraguan masses are already infring-
ing on the property of the belatedly
oppositional bourgeoisie, which for
decades extracted fat profits from the
sweat- of the working people in
Siimo/.aland.

"National reconstruction" is now the
watchword of the victorious Sandinista
National Liberation Front (FSLN). But
on what foundations? With their pro-
gram for a "government of unity of all
anti-Somoza forces" the Sandinista
leaders hope to limit the revolution to
the replacement of a rapacious family
dictatorship by a reformed, "popular-
democratic" capitalist regime. As proof
of the "generosity of the Nicaraguan
Revolution," they have refused to
execute any of the National Guard
criminals who tortured at random and
rained high-explosive bombs on their
own cities. While expropriating the
property of the tyrant and his under-
lings, the new rulers have vowed to
protect the holdings of other capitalists.

From the beginning it has been clear
to all that the "government" in Mana-
gua is highly unstable. The guns are
clearly in the hands of the petty-
bourgeois radical-nationalist Sandinis-
tas, but a united FSLN was established
only at the last minute by papering over
a three-way split. While the "anti-
Somoza bourgeoisie" are presently
pliant, and their influence declined as
the fighting intensified, they are not
passive nor are they discredited by the
stigma of collaboration with the dicta-
tor as the Cuban capitalists were with
Batista. On the other hand, the working
masses are a far more active factor than
in the Cuban Revolution, having armed
themselves and fought key battles in the
streets of the capital and other cities.
The common enemy vanquished, it is
impossible to stop the class struggle
simply by telling the combatants to
return home.

The array of forces in post-Somoza
Nicaragua has the potential for an

explosive confrontation — within the
uneasy ruling coalition, between it and
the impatient working masses or be-
tween a sector of the radical-Jacobin
FSLN and reactionary sectors of the
domestic bourgeoisie. This highly
charged situation poses an acid test for
revolutionists. For while the over-
whelming majority of the left to one
degree or another is tailing after the
popular Sandinistas, the task of Trot-
skyists, who fight on the program of
permanent revolution, is to remain the
party of intransigent working-class
opposition. Those who proclaim that
proletarian-socialist revolution can
come about peacefully in Nicaragua by
nudging the present bonapartist regime
gradually to the left could well be the
first victims of their own illusions —

Expulsion of the Simon Bolivar
Brigade

The suppression of "disorderly" land
seizures is not the only instance of
measures to keep the class struggle from
"becoming more acute." The most
notable was the expulsion of several
dozen foreign leftists, most of them self-
proclaimed Trotskyists, associated with
the "Simon Bolivar Brigade" which had
rushed to Nicaragua in the last stages of
the battle against Somoza. The incident
was described by Time magazine (3
September) at the end of an article
praising the "merciful revolution" that
was "steering a middle course":

"Surprisingly, the first serious threat
came from the extreme left. Dissatisfied
with the government's plans for build-
ing a mixed economy melding public
and private enterprise, 60 Latin-
American Trotskyites, calling them-
selves the Simon Bolivar Brigade,
incited a demonstration by 3,000
Managua factory workers demanding
compensation for wages lost during the
revolution. The revolutionary govern-
ment reacted by ordering its armed
forces to put the Trotskyites on a plane
to Panama."

According to the Washington Post (21
August), banners at the August 15
Managua demonstration carried the
slogans, "The Revolution is in the hands
of the bourgeoisie" and "Power to the
proletariat." The expelled Bolivar Bri-
gaders, however, were charged with
being "counterrevolutionaries" and
"foreign provocateurs."

This expulsion was clearly a blow
struck against any independent leftist
agitation among Nicaraguan workers
and must be roundly condemned by all
would-be socialists. But this is not what
the American Socialist Workers Party

(SWP) thought of it. The SWP did not
protest at all. In fact, it issued four
different "explanations" of the Sandi-
nisla repression against the ostensibly
Trotskyist leaders of the Simon Bolivar
Brigade, one of which consisted of
quoting without comment a statement
by the Nicaraguan ministry of the
interior. Moreover, the SWP's explana-
tions not only shamelessly support the
FSLN government against their own
"comrades," but they join in the witch-
hunt themselves. An August 21 SWP
Political Committee declaration enti-
tled "New U.S. Propaganda Drive
Against Nicaragua" states;

"The Simon Bolivar Brigade was
organized by the Colombian PST
(Partido Socialista de los Traba-
jadores — Socialist Workers Party),
under the direction of an international
grouping known as the 'Bolshevik
Faction,' led by Nahuel Moreno ...
"In the case of the Simon Bolivar
Brigade, the Bolshevik Faction never
consulted the Fourth International
about this project or about the policies
the Brigade followed. These policies ran
counter to the policies decided by the
leadership bodies of the Fourth
International.

"Through the Simon Bolivar Brigade
the Bolshevik Faction led young mili-
tants from several Latin American
countries — people who wanted to help
the fight against Somoza — into a
sectarian adventure. Masquerading as a
section of the Sandinista Front (FSLN),
the Simon Bolivar Brigade entered
Nicaragua from the outside to engage in
its own organizing efforts along the
lines of 'outflanking' the Sandinistas on
the left. Their tactic was to up the ante in
what the Sandinistas were saying, trying
in this way to build a counterforce to
them.

"This grotesque idea — that people from
the outside can maneuver to capture the
leadership of the revolution from those
who have emerged in the course of the
struggle — has nothing whatever to do
with Trotskyism, revolutionary
socialism.

"The unfortunate episode of the Simon
Bolivar Brigade was just what the
Carter administration was waiting for."
— Militant, 31 August
In another article in<he same issue of
the Militant, on "The Facts About the
Simon Bolivar Brigade," the SWP
labels the Managua workers demonstra-
tion a "provocative clash" and accuses
the leaders of the Brigade of having
"acted irresponsibly." Again, the"fact"-
sheet charges that the Brigade's at-
tempts to "outflank [the FSLN] from
the left" had "absolutely nothing in
common with the position of the Fourth
International." And it ostenjtatiously
washes its hands of any association:
"fhe Fourth International is in no way

responsible for the activities of the
Brigade." Quite a mouthful coming
from people who are formally part of
the same "International."

The SWP's response to the expulsion
of the Bolivar Brigaders was the most
naked stab in the back by a section of the
fake-Trotskyist "United" Secretariat
(USec) since its supporters in Portugal
found themselves on opposite sides of
the barricades in the summer of 1977.
But what about the other wings of this
p.seudo-Fourth International, long ac-
customed to the dirtiest of factional
tricks? Those sections associated with
the former International Majority
Tendency of Ernest Mandel were less
virulent than the SWP in their attacks
on the Morenoite-led Brigade, at most
clucking their tongues at the FSLN-
brdered repression. Th-us the newspaper
of the French LCR, Rouge (24-30
August), felt constrained to condemn
the remarks of agrarian reform minister
Wheelock, who in announcing the
deportations launched a diatribe against
"Trotskyism and all those who want to
accelerate the evolution of the regime in
Nicaragua." Of course, on the next page
the editors published a friendly inter-
view with the same Wheelock, remark-
ing favorably on his revolutionary
credentials.

As to the expulsions themselves, the
LCR statement said only that "It is
rather unlikely, whatever may be the
political differences, that 60 foreigners
could pose a real problem for a
revolutionary leadership enjoying im-
mense popular support." Supposedly,
then, if leftists did pose a real threat to
the Sandinista regime, the LCR would
begin foaming at the mouth like the
rabid SWP! By the next issue. Rouge
(31 August-6 September) could only
bring itself to complain that "the terms
in which the Nicaraguan government
decreed the expulsion of 'foreign'
militants constitute a disturbing prece-
dent." Finally, a resolution by the LCR
central committee (published in the 7-13
September Rouge) screwed up its
courage to utter the mildest of formal
protests, declaring that the expulsions
themselves "constitute an unacceptable
precedent." Anyone counting on such
"militant solidarity" to back him against
anti-communist repression had better
forget it.

But while Rouge was gradually
escalating its adjectives from "disturb-
ing" to "unacceptable," its man in
Managua was taking a sharply different
tack. According to the SWP's Intercon-

5

tinentai Press (24 September), a USec
delegation including LCR Latin Ameri-
can "expert" jean-Pierre Beauvais (as
well as Hugo Blanco, Peter Camejo,
Barry Sheppard and others) handed a
statement to the Sandinistas hailing"the
revolutionary leadership of the FSLN"
and declaring: "All activities which
create divisions between the mobilized
masses and the FSLN are contrary to
the interests ol th£ revolution." Dotting
the i's and crossing the t's, it added:
"This was the case specifically with the
activities of the 'Sim6n Bolivar Bri-
gade'," which it termed "sectarian." And
to top it off the USec. delegation
explicitly endorsed the expulsion:

"In a political and economic situation
that required the greatest possible unity
in struggle, the FSLN was right to
demand that the non-Nicaraguan mem-
bers of this group — which defined itself
above all as a military organization —
leave the country."

It is not reported whether Blanco/
Camejo/Sheppard/ Beauvais et al. re-
ceived thirty pieces of silver, although
they clearly hope to cash in on their
perfidy by becoming the authorized
cheerleaders for the FSLN. But the
roots of such treachery are political and
go back more than a quarter of a
century, to the refusal of Michel Pablo,
then secretary of the Fourth Interna-
tional, to defend the Chinese I'rotskyists
jailed by Mao. He called, them "refugees
from a revolution" for refusing to bow
to the new bureaucratic rulers in Peking.
For Pablo it was part of his liquidation-
ist program that led to the destruction of
the Fourth international as the organ-
ized world revolutionary vanguard. In
the case of his epigones it is the
consequence of their Pabloist policies,
which lead all wings of the USec to chase
after non-proletarian. anti-Marxist
leaderships — from the Chinese Stalin-
ists to Portuguese army officers and
now the Sandinista nationalists. . . .

Morenoite Charlatans and
Adventurers

So what about the Sim6n Bolivar
Brigade . and its parent. Moreno's
Bolshevik Faction. Certainly in com-
parison with the groveling betrayals of
the SWP and the more shamefaced
Mandelite majority of the USec, the
Moreno outfit might seem a militant
alternative. A look at Moreno's
chameleon-like political track record,
his notoriety for underhanded Tmancial

swindles and his ultra-reformist pro-
gram in bis home base, Argentina, will
shatter this facade. And, indeed, the
SWP is busily dredging up some of this
material, filling the pages of Interconti-
nental Press with endless scandal stories
about the disreputable adventurer
Nahuel Moreno. No doubt Barnes and
Mandel are getting ready to expel the
troublemaker. But they are in no
position to complain. For years they
have coexisted in the same International
(and in the case of the S W P, in the same
faction) with this notorious snake-oil
salesman, both after and during his
worst betrayals. They have dirty hands.

When they are not echoing the
Sandinista leaders' slanders that organ-
izing workers around anti-capitalist
demands is a "provocation," the SWP/
USec charge that Moreno is an imposter
traveling under false passports. Accord--
ing to the USec delegatiori statement,
'to capitalize on the prestige of the
FSLN," the Sim6n Bolivar Brigade
''cloaked itself with the Sandinista
banner." From news accounts of the
August 15 Managua demonstration, it
does seem that many of the protesters
thought they were supporting a wing of
the FSLN (although this does not lessen
the significance of several thousand
- workers demonstrating against the
government's pro-capitalist policies).
But who do Barnes and Hansen think
they are 'kidding? Their international
**Nicaragua solidarity" campaign is
intended precisely to drape the USec in
Sandinista red-and-black, just as the
SWP's Fair Play forCuba Committee in
the early '60s tried to capitalize on the
popularity of Castroism. They just
prefer to do it at long distance.

Besides, Moreno has a long history of
impersonating other tendencies. He got
his start in Argentina by pretending to
be a left Peronist. In the late 1950s his
review Palabra Obrera described
itself as an "organ of revolutionary
working-class Peronism" and carried on
its masthead the slogan "under the
discipline of General Per6n and of the
Peronist Supreme Council" (see **Ar-
gentina: The Struggle Against Peron-
ism," WV No. 24, 6 July 1973). When
Peronism was no longer the rage,
Moreno fused with a Castroite group
and ran endless pictures of Che Guevara
on the front pages of his papers. After a
brief fling as a crypto-Maoist (hailing
the Red Guards), he settled down to a
more mundane existence as a social

■ ■ ;'9.'uen!»', Cuando»lDU7hl5'.-;:!;ir..i '.r. irain /
'^iMiiSii^''''' '' " W

^TT^oif !3 resis^nc'j al laScismo. f J^^^fe^js \
an al c'jeb'o hermano ae fiicaogua? Mo.

fs per tso que nuestro partido ha levanbdo la jnicialua '
<St (oimar la brijada de volunlarios Simdn Bolivar, pa
qrie M Nicatifua, baio la difeccifin militar dti frto
S^ndinsta d» lilierjcijn Nacional. coniSLa con*a
^♦■'cal Somcia

Open letter of Moreno's Col-
ombian PST announcing for-
mation of the Simon Bolivar
Brigade "under the military
leadership of the Sandinista
National Liberation Front ..."
(El Sociaiista, 22 June 1979)

democrat — and to this end fused witti a
wing of tlie tiistoric Argentine Socialist
Party, in order to capture its ballot slot.
Not one to quibble about small change,
Moreno promptly wrote a social-
democratic program to correspond to
the new label (see Intercontinental
Press. 13 November 1972). Truly,
Moreno is,, as we have often described
him, a political chameleon.

In a polemic against the Simon
Bolivar Brigade, the Colombian Man-
delite PSR charges that the Morenoite
undertaking was simply an ^dventure:
"The brigade as such never entered
combat. It could not have done so
without adequate training and without
being prepared to accept the discipline
of the FSLN" (see Intercontinental
Press, 17 September 1979). It does
appear that for the most part Moreno's
brigade, despite its bombastic propa-
ganda, sat out the fighting in Costa
Rica. In fact, its U.S. -based supporters,
the Sandinistas for Socialism in Nicara-
gua, did not even leave for Managua
until the day after Somoza's fall! So the
heroic, gun-in-hand guerrilla image the
Brigade leaders would like to assume
(Colombian PST '\omandante" Kernel
George reportedly showed up in battle
fatigues for a fund-raising rally in
Bogota) is certainly undeserved.

It is not true, however, that the Sim6n
Bolivar Brigade was unprepared to
"accept the discipline of the FSLN."
Moreno's idea of "discipline" is proba-
bly not to the liking of the Sandinistas
(or the USec leaders), but the Brigade
was definitely built on the basis of
subordination to the FSLN. That makes
its present situation all the more ironic.
The "Open Letter" by the Morenoite
Colombian PST to form the Brigade
called for volunteers to go to Nicaragua
to fight "under the military leadership"
of the Sandinista Front; and it flaunted
letters from FSLN leaders Ed6n Pastora
("Comandante Zero") and Plutarco
Hernandez Sinchez saying its members
were "acting under the leadership of the
General Staff" (see illustration). (The
real content of the "military" posing, of
course, has to be taken in light of the
lack of combat activity by these Johnny-
come-lately guerrillas.)

Politically, the Morenoites called for
"a Sandinista government" — although
for form's sake they tacked on that it
should arise from supposed "organs of
people's power" and be based on a
program of "breaking with the bour-
geoisie and imperialism" (El Sociaiista,
22 June). Such pious wishes aside, they

got their Sandinista government and —
guess what — they get expelled from the
country! That's what often happens
when you tail after bonapartists. So the
Simon Bolivar Brigade managed to
acquire a militant image in spite of itself.
As for its detractors in the Colombian
PSR, they note that sending off the
Brigade was essentially a gimmick
rather than a real act of proletarian
internationalism. That is true — genuine
Trotskyists, had they the resources,
would seek to build a communist
nucleus among the urb^n workers
rather than tagging along after Coman-
dante Zero on the Southern Front. But
what the PSR counterposes is not the
struggle for an independent Trotskyist
leadership in Nicaragua but inoffensive
"solidarity" demonstrations in Bogot4.
The difference between Morenoites and
Mandelites is the difference between
adventurers and cheerleaders, between
con men and PR men.

fhe PSR polemic ended by touching
on "the most sensitive point of all, the
finances of the Simon Bolivar Brigade."
Many people "have begun to have
doubts about where the funds gathered
by the PST are going," they report. And
money is always the most sensitive point
with Moreno. For those who know his
past, the involuntary response upon
learning that Colombian Morenoites
were organizing an "international bri-
gade" for Nicaragua was to say: "Nicar-
aguans. Colombians — keep your hands
on your wallets!" But it hardly behooves
the VSfc to raise this charge now. The
Argentine Politica Obrera group has
been complaining for years that Mori-
no's Editorial Pluma took SO,(MX) copies
of Trotsky works on contract from
them, deliberately held off paying for
them for months until the March 1976
Videla coup, and then, pleading pover-
ty, refused to pay.

Moreno's fmancial skulduggery is
legendary in the Latin American left.
The most sensationalist case concerns
allegations that he failed to deliver
promised funds to Hugo Blanco's
guerrilla operation in Peru in 1962, and
his role in the disappearance of sev-
eral thousands of dollars taken in a
bank expropriation by the Tupac
Amaru group and destined for Blanco
(for a detailed account of this affair, see
Richard Gott, Guerrilla Movements in
Latin America [1972]). In a review of
Robert Alexander's grotesquely inaccu-
rate book Trotskyism in Latin America,
Joseph Hansen noted in 1977 that
Moreno had never answered these

' 7

charges. But in view of the scandalous
nature of the charges, it is notable that
Hansen evidently never bothered to get
an explanation from Mpreno during the
six years that they were co-leaders of the
USec minority.

Moreno stands before the workers
movement convicted many times over of
political charlatanism and breaches of
proletarian morality. Yet: his operation
is such that he frequently puts on a cover
of programmatic militancy for purely
factional purposes. On several occa-
sions this has led the Morenoites to
adopt positions imitating (or borrowed
from?) the authentic Trotskyism of the
international Spartacist tendency. Thus
in polemicizing against an article on
Eurocommunism and Soviet "dissi-
dents"' by Morenoite Eugenio Greco,
SWP hack Gerry Foley noted that the
**award for originality" in raising these
positions belonged to "sectarians" such
as the iSt (Irnercontinental Press, 5
December 1977). And indeed, the Greca
article (Revista ^Je America, August
1977) does bear a notable resemblance
to our own writings on the subject
(except that, funny thing, the Moreno-
ites identify Stalinism with dependence
on Moscow gold).

In particular, in founding the Bolshe-
vik Tendency after his break with the
SWP in late 1975-early 1976, Moreno
adopted positions on Portugal and
Angola strikingly similar to those of the
Spartacist tendency. On Portugal he
denounced the SNVP's tailing after the
CIA-funded Socialist Party of Mario
Soares as well as .the Mandelite I MPs
political support to the Stalinist/ Armed
Forces Movement bloc. On Angola he
called for military support to the M PLA
against the South African/CIA invasion
while formally opposing political sup-
port to any of the three competing
nationalist groups. The principal char-
acteristic of these formally orthodox
positions is that they are far from home
and they are utterly arbitrary, not
derived from a coherent programmatic
worldview.

Thus, while Moreno condemns the
SWP's shameless support for the Portu-
guese SP, in Argentina he fused with
Juan Carlos Coral's rump social demo-
crats in 1971. While criticizing MandePs
capitulation to the Eurocommunists, his
Venezuelan supporters are now deeply
embedded in the "Eurocommunist"
MAS. While criticizing the IMTs
support for the demagogic Carvalho
and the Portuguese MFA, Moreno's
Colombian PST called for "support to

the nationalist policies of Torrijos'' m
Panama, calling this demagogic military
officer (friend of both Castro and
Chase Manhattan Bank) "progressive"
in his "confrontation with imperialism"
(see "U.S. Out of Panama Now!" tVV
No. 203, 28 April 1978).

Feigning orthodoxy when it is
"cheap" — in distant climes and when it
suits his unprincipled maneuvers — close
to home where it counts, Moreno's
opportunism exceeds that of any other
wing of the USec. Trenchantly criticiz-
ing Bolivian POR leader Guillermo
Lora for joining an "anti-imperialist
front" with General Torres in Bolivia in
1971 (Interrxationat Socialist Review,
February 1973), two years later Moreno
himself joined a popular-front Group of
8 together with the Argentine CP and
the leading bourgeois parties in pledging
support to the bonapartist government
of Juan Per6n (see "PST Caught
Redhanded," iVy So. 49, 19 July 1974).
Today when the Sandinistas are interna-
tional celebrities, Moreno is a gung-ho
guerrillaist; but when the Castroite
PRT/ERP (then affiliated to the USec)
was stirring things up in Argentina with
its kidnappings and attacks on the army,'
Moreno's PST equated "the guerrillas
and their rnirror image — the terrorists
of the AAA and other organizations of
the ultraright" (Iniercontinenial Press,
28 October 1974). ^

Nahuel Moreno's record is that o| a
huckster who has put on the garb;^f
virtually every popular trend in the
Latin American left— Peronism, Cas-
troism, Maoism, and now Sandinois|n.
His "left" positions on internatiorial
topics bear no relation; whatever to his
rightist positions -at home. The oi|ly
reason he appears militant over Nicai|a-
gua todaj/L is that he was caught oiit In
the middle of a maneuver with the
FSLN^and that while he is up to his
old trickspah^i rest of the US6b- has
moved diifificdy to the right. Until the
FSLN t6i(l>r pftSver rn Manigu^ the
Morehoities* ciill for a Sandinista gdv-
ernipent wa's foVmally to the right of the
other tendencies of the USec, which
raised various criticisms of the FSLN
ties to the opposition bourgeoisie. But
as soon as Mandel and Barnes smelled a
chance to hook up to a popular cause,
they leapt right over Moreno and left
him holding the bag in the unaccus-
tomed role of the far left wing.

Finally, it should be noted that in
choosing the name Simon Bolivar
Brigade Moreno chose a singularly
appropriate sobriquet. Perhaps it was

8

intended to imitate the Abraham Lin-
coln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War —
although Bolivar, himself from a slave-
holding landowner family, would be
more appropriately compared to
George Washington. But militarily' the
great hero of the wars of independence
was a disaster in every way: he lost
virtually every battle he fought, literally

do/ens of them, repeatedly abandoning
his troops in monients of adversity. Kis
specialty, wrote Karl Marx in an article
on Bolivar, was "triumphal entrances,
manifestos and the proclamation of
constitutions." He was, said Marx in a
letter to Engels, **the mpst cowardly,
brutal and miserable scum." So too
Nahuel Moreno. ■

"OCI/

Moreno:

Nicaragua

Makes

Strange

Bedfellows"

—Workers Vanguard,
No. 242, 26 October 1979

As events in Nicaragua send the
United Secretariat carousel madly
whirling, the USec has spun off an
unexpected liaison. Suddenly the
French Organisation Communiste In-
ternationa iistc (OCI) of Pierre Lambert
is making common cause with Nahuel
Moreno's Bolshevik Faction (BF). Only
yesterday it would have seemed to
casual observers that Lambertists and
Morenoites stood at opposite ends of
the pseudo-Trotskyist spectrum, and
never the twain would meet. The BF
these days lays claim to the USec's left
flank, while the OCI represents the
closest thing to a chemically pure social-
democratic parody of Trotskyism. Yet
today they unite to praise the Simon
Bolivar Brigade (BSB), recently ex-
pelled from Nicaragua by the victorious
Sandinista National Liberation Front
(FSLN), and to denounce the "reconsti-
tuted" (but none too stable) USec
majority led by Ernest Mandel and Jack
Barnes. Today, but not tomorrow; for
this most putrid of rotten blocs is likely
to have the lifespan of a mosquito.

At a stormy meeting of the United
Secretariat over the weekend of Septem-
ber 30 the USec adopted a series of
motions which add up to total liquida-
tion of an independent presence and
political line in Nicaragua, in favor of
complete subordination to the petty-
bourgeois Sandinista Front. The
Morenoite-led Bolivar Brigade was
unequivocally condemned and the BF
ordered to cease operating as a "public
faction." on pain of expulsion. A
lengthy political resolution, "Nicara-
gua: Revolution on the March," fulmi-
nates against a "headlong plunge into
ultraleftism" and "adventuristically
forcing the rhythm of the class struggle,"
while labeling calls to break with the
bourgeoisie a "sectarian temptation of
applying an abstract schema" (/«/moo-
tinenial Press, 22 October). It ends by
calling on all USec supporters to act "as
loyal militants of the organization
which led the overthrow of Somoza" —

i.e., to dissolve their organizations, join
the FSLN, shut up and take orders from
the Sandinista leaders.

In response to this treachery, Moreno
submitted a countermotion condemn-
ing the usee's scandalous refusal to
express even elementary solidarity with
its own "comrades" in the face of
repression by the bourgeois Nicaraguan
government. This Bolshevik Faction
resolution "REJECr[S] these meas-
ures, which break all rules of democrat-
ic centralism," and calls on militants to
"prevent the holding of an anti-
democratic world congress." The threat
to split before the USec's "I Ith World
Congress," scheduled for early Novem-
ber, was clear. In addition to More-
no's BF, members of the Leninist-
Trotskyist Tendency (LTT) voted for
this motion. (The LTT is a grouping of
former supporters of the Leninist-
Trotskyist Faction — led by the Ameri-
can Socialist Workers Party — who after
the SWP's dissolution of the LTF in
1977 wanted to continue the factional
struggle against the USec majority
under Mandel, and have since political-
ly aligned themselves ^ro.vio modo with
the Lambertists.)

Immediately after the explosion in
Brussels, representatives of the LTT and
the BF held a private meeting with the
leadership of the OCI, which then
provocatively published this fact in its
public nQv/s\cnf^r (l-ettre d' Informations
Ouvrieres, 10 October) along with
various USec internal documents
("from a dossier given us by Comrade
Moreno"). The newsletter politically
endorses the Simon Bolivar Brigade and
the BF as attempting to "aid the masses
in developing their own organizations,"
while the 6 October issue of the OCI's
newjspaper Informations Ouvrieres an-
nounces that refusal to defend the BSB's
right to stay in Nicaragua would be
joining "the liquidators of the Fourth
International" (in the previous month
and a half the weekly lO had nothing to
say on the subject). So the bloc is sealed.

9

at least for the purposes of a joint
wrecl<ing operation against the SWP
and Mandel, while the OCI's previous
attempts to join the United Secretariat
have apparcntfy been shelved for now.
Lambert was angling to blow apart the
USec, and now that a split is clearly in
the offing, he has simply placed his
money and picked his horse.

Left or Right on Nicaragua?

In the face of the SWP's outrageous
support for Sandinista Front repression
against the workers and its alliance with
the "anti-Somoza bourgeoisie" in a
capitalist government, and in contrast
to the Mandelites' more shamefaced and
whimpering capitulation, it's very cheap
for the Morenoite/La'mbertist bloc to
look left on Nicaragua. Thus the OCI
wrote of the new FSLN-appointed
regime:

"This bourgeois government, installed
solely due to the conciliationist spirit of
the Sandinista leaders. .. has received,
for the accomplishment of its coun-
terrevolutionary tasks, the support
of imperialism and the Kremlin

bureaucracy "

—Informations Ouvrieres, 8-23
August

Similarly, the Costa Rican Organiza-
cion Socialista de los Trabajadores
(OS [ ). a USec sympathizing section
which is linked with the LTT and
directly tied to the French OCI, wrote in
its newspaper Que Hacer? {26 Junc-\\
July) shortly before the fall of Somoza
that the opposition by the FSLN's
provisional government to immediate
elections "clearly demonstrates its in-
tentions of safeguarding the interests
of the national bourgeoisie and imperi-
alism . . ." (translated in Intercontinental
Press, I October). In turn, the Colombi-
an Morenoites of the Partido Socialista

CDMPRE DONGS S^H^lH\Sl^S

Buy Sandino Bonds'

dc los Trabajadores (PS I") write that
Latin American governments:

"...bought 'life insurance' for capital-
ism in Nicaragua with their intervention
and support for the FSLN .... To sum
up, the 'democratic' bourgeoisies have
sent the bill to the FSLN; and the advice

of Castro is very clear: pay up!"
—El Socialista, 7 September

These are very left-sounding critiques
of the currently popular Sandinista
regime. But the real policies of the BF/
BSB and the OCI / LTT are considerably
to the right of their present posture, and
moreover mutually sharply counter-
posed. In fact, before the FSLN took
power on July 20 there was no basis
whatever for Morenoites to unite with
Lambertists in or over Nicaragua. As we
have explained previously ("Revolution
in Nicaragua and the Left," WV No.
240, 28 September), the Morenoites'
present hostility to the FSLN is the
pique of rejected suitors. Over the Jast
year they have repeatedly called for a
Sandinista government, later dressed up
as "a government of the Front and of the
workers and people's organizations" (£/
Socialista, 15 June) and similar formu-
las. But the FSLN, under the pressure of
imperialism and "friendly" Latin Amer-
ican capitalist governments, and at the
behest of Castro, preferred the company
of industrialists and technocrats.

As for the Morenoite policies in the
Simon Bolivar Brigade, they were even
more opportunist (while also aggres-
sively pressuring the FSLN tops, soon
leading to their downfall). Sending an
international brigade is a sometimes
necessary and valiant tactic for commu-
nists in civil war situations; the partici-
pation of several dozen European
Irotskyists in the POUM's Lenin
Brigade during the Spanish Civil War,
lor instance, was principled and admir-
able. But since one can't expect to
operate independently of an existing
military leadership, it is essential to
establish and defend the proletarian
character of such a unit. The Bolivar
Brigade was a parody of these princi-
ples. Its very name denies a working-
class character, and the Morenoite
"Open Letter" calling for its establish-
ment says flatly, "the only programmatr
ic point of the Simon Bolivar Brigade is
to support the struggle of the Sandinista
people..." {Ill Socialista, 22 June). In
addition to the Morenoites' usual
financial shady dealings — the Colombi-
an PS r, which organized the Brigade,
raised money by selling bogus Sandino
Bonds— they appealed to the Colombi-
an government to "legally recognize the
Simon Bolivar Brigade, guaranteeing its
papers, transportation and financing."

But if Moreno & Co. tried to
capitalize on enthusiasm for the
Sandinista-led revolution against the
hated tyrant Somoza, and their gim-

mick simply blew up in their faces, at
least they stood to the left of the petty-
bourgeois nationalist FSLN. In con-
trast, the Costa Rican OST — and by
extension its co-thinkers of the Leninist-
f rotskyist , Tendency — denounced the
Sandinista front as criminally adven-
turist and ultra-leftist! Their chief
spokesman on Nicaragua is one Fausto
Amador (brother of assassinated FSLN
founder Carlos Fonseca Amador), who
quit the Front some years ago as a
demoralized element. In a pamphlet
entitled Addnde va Nicaragua {\^here Js
Nicaragua Cioing?), published in Febru-
ary by the OSf; Fausto Amador and
Sara Santiago presented an analysis
that was not only 100 percent wrong— it
amounted to defeatist propaganda, in
effect calling on the Nicaraguan masses
to lay down their arms when the
showdown with the dictator was almost
underway:

"In Nicaragua, the second offensive was
rapidly being converted into a myth

which no one believed any more

There will not be a second offensive,
fhat is obvious for everyone, at least in
the immediate future — The lack of a
second offensive would reveal the
September [1978] action as an ill-fated
adventure."

I he OS r/L rrs "alternative"—
peaceful demonstrations for democratic
rights — was crctinist legalism in a
country suffering under a bonapartist
dictatorship (and, moreover, in the
throes of a popularly supported insur-
gency). As we noted when the American
SWP printed a similar piece by Amador
and Santiago last June: "To present this
social-democratic cowardice and de-
moralization as having anything to do
with Marxism is just about the worst
thing the SWP/USec could do to
besmirch the name of Trotskyism before
the Central American masses" ( IT'KNo.
234. 22 June). As for the OCi, //,v
opposition to the new FSLN regime is
based purely and simply on Stalino-
phobia — denouncing "the sudden resur-
rection of the moribund Nicaraguan
Socialist Party (national branch office
of the Kremlin)" and "the excessive
weight of its members vis-a-vis the
Sandinistas in the government" (lO. 8-
23 August).

Portugal, Angola, Cuba...

We have dealt elsewhere with the
stark contradiction between thp abstract
"leftism" of Moreno's Bolshevik Fac-
tion on Eurocommunism, the dictator-
ship of the proletariat or popular
Irontism in far-off Europe and his ultra-

opportunist practice in L^tin America
(political support to Peron, Torrijos,
etc.). But what of its new bloc partners
of the Leninist-Frotskyist Tendency
(and its mentors in the OCI)? In
opposing the dissolution of the L I F in
1977 the future L T Ters put forward a
lace of left-wing militancy: where the
SWI» called the Mandelite majority
ultraleftist, they said centrist; where
.lack Harnes said the faction was formed
to fight guerrillaism alone, they said it
was also to fight popular frontism at
home. But by the time it came to
formulating a "Call for the Formation
of an International Tendency" ( [SWP]
International Internal Discussion Bul-
letin, December 1978). the future L TT
stood on the whole of "programmatic
and political acquisitions" of the LTF,
and in particular "the texts of the L I F
on the Portuguese revolution and on
Angola."

I his statement definitively branded
the Leninist-Frotskyist Tendency as a
refonnist formation, and ignominious
capitulators besides. For what did the
LTF stand for in Portugal and Angola?
At the height of the 1975 polarization in
Portugal, when Lisbon workers were
taking over factories, the LTFcalled for
a purely "democratic" program of
defense of the constituent assembly (at
the time the battle cry of the right). As
the Socialist Party of Mario Soares was
leading a mass anti-Communist mobili-
zation which was burning down CP
offices, the SWP proclaimed that the
"real vanguard of the Portuguese
working class. .. participated in the SP
demonstrations" (Militant, 8 August
1975). And the OCI called for a "Soares
Ciovernment" {Infortnations Ouvrieres,,
23 July-6 August 1975). Moreno broke
from the SWP and split the LTF
precisely over this issue, while the future
1. 1 l ers were at first even harder in
condemning the SWP's tailing after
Soares (only to capitulate a few weeks
later and vote for the L TF's "Key Issues
in the Portuguese Revolution"
resolution).

For principled Marxists differences
of the magnitude that divided the
Morenoites and Lambertists over Por-
tugal would make unity impossible: like
the SWP and Mandel, they would have
been facing each other on opposite sides
of the barricades in Lisbon. The same on
Angola, where at the height of the
fighting between the South African-led,
CIA-financed irriperialist drive on Lu-
anda, the SWP/ LTF refused to take

11

sides (or the military victory of the
Soviet-backed MPLA. (Later they tried
to disguise this vile betrayal by some
heavy-handed "editing" of a January
1976 SWP national committee state-
ment.) Moreno denounced this in the
most violent terms, publishing a whole
book on the subject (Angola: La
revoluiU'm negra en marcha [1977])
where he said that, "the best way to aid
Vorster arid Yankee imperialism was to
say what the SWP said...." So how
does Moreno feel about uniting today
with people who consider the SWP/
l.TF's stand "historic"*.'

And Cuba? On Cuba, the LIT
supports "the general line of D. Keil's
contributions." while three leaders of
the Costa Rican OS r( Andres. Rodrigo
and Sara) signed together with Keil a
document labeling the Castro regime a
"burcaucrati/ed workers state" ("For a
Change in the Fourth InternationaPs
Position on Cuba," [SWP] IIDB.
December 1978). Again, at first glance
this might seem a move to the left from
the usee's political support to the
"unconscious Trotskyist" Fidel (now
taken to new lengths by the SWP's latest
panegyrics to Castro, the champion of
peace and friend of the world's chil-
dren). But as we pointed out in our
article, "For Workers Political Revolu-
tion in Cuba!"( ^^'^'No. 224, 2 February
1979), Keil et al. were attacking the
SWP '\from the right . arguing in effect
lor a consistently social-demovraiic
position of opposing all Stalinist re-
gimes." We summed up: "Add up the
SWP/LTF positions on China, Viet-
nam, Portugal Ami /4/7i?o/fl and throw in
a deformed workers state position on
Cuba and what do you get? A fleshed-
out program of Stalinophobia." The
l. rr/OS r's openly counterrevolution-
ary positions on Nicaragua, calling the
Sandinistas' victorious "second offen-
sive an "adventure" «rc a vivid confir-
mation of our earlier conclusion.

...And the Strange Case of
Fausto Amador

These questions — the most basic
issues of revolutionary perspective in
key recent events— are but the small
change in the horse-trading combina-
tions and recombinations of USec
factional struggles. There is a basis ol
sorts for the Morenoite/Lambertist
bloc: both arc deeply reformist while
appearing left today on Nicaragua.
Besides there is the attractive bait that
the OCI recently broke with Moreno's
long-standing opponents in the Argen-

tine Politica Obrcra group (enemy of my
enemy makes you my friend, etc.). But
there are a lew sticky points, even lor
these consummate opportunists. And
one of these is the case of Fausto
Amador, already introduced to our
readers.

For F. Amador did not simply break
from the FSLN. He was interviewed on
Somo/a's television and spoke to
Somo/a's press, where he urged other
members of the guerrilla organization to
.lay down their arms in return for
promises of amnesty by the blood-
soaked dynastic dictatorship. For this
the FSLN leaders rightly considered
him a traitor. Later, as a Nicaraguan
cultural attache in Brussels — i.e., an
employee of Somo/a — he was reported-
ly won to the U.Sec's perversion of
Irotskyism. Naturally this caused a
certain commotion in Central America,
where the case was well-known. Moreno
picked this up and was the first to make
it an issue in the USec. At a December
1977 meeting of the central committee
of the Colombian PSl . Bolshevik
haction . leader Eugenio Cireco
complained:

"Do you know the name they give in
Europe to what Fausto Amador did. It

was called collaborationism If a very

probable combination of circumstances
occurs: that Somoza falls; that the
Frente Sandinista emerges as a move-
ment of great prestige because of its
antidictatorial struggle.... the Frente
Sandinista might say: I would like the
Fourth International to explain why
Fausto . Amador Arrieta is in its
ranks... and, gentlemen, at that mo-
ment Trotskyism will be finished in
Central Am'erica."

—[SWP] I/DB, April 1978
And so it came to pass. But today the
notorious Fausto Amador, a leader of
the Costa Rican OS I . is defended by the
L T 1 anJ ii.s new allies of Moreno & Co.
The BF countermotion at the Septem-
ber 30 USec meeting explicitly defends
Amador against his accusers, "a petty-
bourgeois leadership foreign to the
Trotskyist movement." Attacks on the
personal integrity of political leaders are
the bane of the Latm American left,
where most splits focus on accusations
of stolen money or cowardice and
betrayal. In the case of Fausto Amador
the charges are essentially proven by his
own admission: and yet he remains a
recognized leader of the USec. What is
destroyed by this fact is not Trotskyism,
however, but the revolutionary preten-
sions of these renegades from Marxism
for whom Fausto Amador's hands are
only a little dirtier than all the rest.B

12

Moreno in Argentina J:

From Left Peranism to Social Democracy

excef pted from:

"Argentina:
The Struggle
Against
Peronism"

— Workers Vanguard,
No. 24, 6 July 1973

The Moreno Group and
"Left "-Peronism

The largest group in Argentina
claiming to support Trotskyism is the
Partido Socialista de los Trabajadores
(PST) led by Nahuel Moreno. Moreno's
tendency has existed since the late
1940's, and at least since 1952 has
exhibited the fundamental characteris-
tics of Pabloism in a classic form.
Pablo abandoned the struggle for the
creation of independent Trotskyist par-
ties: in the early 1950's he concocted
the objectivist theory that Stalinism
would be "forced" to take revolutionary
measures and thus revolutionaries
should bury themselves in the dominant
workers parties. In LatinAmerica this
revisionism was carried to a "higher"
level when Pablo ordered the Bolivian
POR into the petty-bourgeois nation-
alist MNR, which was in no way a
workers party.

In Argentina the Moreno group had
opposed Peronism until 1952 but then
rejected this position as "sectarian."
After that "we considered ourselves a
'de facto' party of the anti- Yankee
front of Peronism" (quote of an "apolo-
gist for Moreno" in Workers Press,
14 April 1972). According to the same
source,: "our innovation was that for
the first time a Marxist group entered
a bourgeois party." Immersion in this
bourgeois party lasted for the next
twelve yearsi

After the "Liberating Revolution" of
1955 Moreno formed the Movimiento de
Agrupaciones Obreras (MAO— Move-
ment of Workers Groupings) and put
out the magazine Palabra Obrera, which
referred to itself as the "organ of
revolutionary workets' Peronism" is-
sued "under the discipline of General
Per6n and the Peronist Supreme Coun-
cil".'

In the 1958 elections Palabra
Obrera, while initially opposing a vote
for the bourgeois Radical Frondizi,

eventually decided to "save the activist
unity" by calling for a "vote for the
gorila Frondizi" {Avanzada Socialista,
9 May 1973). During this same period
the Moreno group was particularly
associated with a group of left- Peronist
leaders of the "62 organizations" (the
most prominent being Loholaberry) who
had won influence during the resistance
following the 1955 coup. A few years
later the same Loholaberry was direct-
ly collaborating with the brutal anti-
labor Onganfa dictatorship.

After 1964, when Palabra Obrera
fused with the Castroite FRIP group,
Moreno switched allegiances and took
on guerillaist feathers (see "Guevarism
vs. Social Democracy in the USec,"
WV No. 23, 22 June 1973). While
achieving some influence as a result of
mass work wiUi Tucumin sugar work-
ers, again in alliance with the "peron-
istas combativos" of the FOTIA lead-
ership, the Moreno group did not itself
undertake guerilla warfare. When some
of the members began pushing to im-
plement the program, Moreno split.

The trade-union work of the Moreno
group has had a consistent syndicalist
character, refusing to politicize the
spontaneous struggles of the class. In
the general strikes of late 1970 it
called for an unlimited general strike
for an immediate pay increase, end
to the state of siege and recognition
of all political parties, and for the
formation of factory assemblies to lead
the strike (La Verdad, 10 November
1970). It did not call for a workers
government nor did it advocate the
formation of a national strike com-
mittee to lead the mobilization. Simi-
larly, the PST (then PSA) call for a
workers' slate in the last elections did
not raise any programmatic criteria!
Its appeals were directed to locally
prominent militants connected with the
CP, left-Peronists or syndicalists, and
the main demand was for a slate with
80 percent workers with an unspecified
"workers' program.*

Since the March elections, the fall-

13

ure to present a clear alternative to the
Peronists has become actively danger-
ous. In late May the PST attended a
meeting with C4mpora which, according
to the PST itself, "was a great meeting
of the parties and organizations of the
Argentine bosses to give their support
to Cimpora's proposals." The PST's
position was that all the government's
acts which develop toward the workers'

interests would be giyen critical sup-
port. "Without confusing the banners.
Dr. Cimpora can count on our prole-
tarian solidarity" {Avamada Socialista,
30 May-6 June 1973). Cimpora-Perdn
begin gearing up for a crackdown on
the "Trotskyists" and PST leader Juan
Carlos Coral promises the PST's criti-
cal support for the positive measures
of the Clmpora government! . . .

excerpted from:

"Guevarism
vs.

Social
Democracy
in tlie USec

—Workers Vanguard,
No. 23, 22 June 1973

99

palabra pbrera

Moreno's press in the '50s:
Palabra Obrera, "Organ of
Revolutionary Workers
Peronism— Under the
Discipline of Gen. Per6n and
the Peronist High Council "

The •Trotskyists" II: The PST
and the Social-Democratic Swamp

Thus the "Trotskylst- Castrolte"
theories of the PRT/ERP guerlllaists
have nothing in common with authentic
Trotskyism. In the USec faction fight,
the opposition to the PRT radical ter-
rorists and their European USec sup-
porters is led by the reformist U.S.
SWP, which is backing the Argentine
PST of Nahuel Moreno, pseudo-Trot-
skyist cafe revolutionary sui generis,
and until 1969 the leading spokesman of
the USec in Latin America. Although
the S\VP-Moreno wing now seeks to
pose as principled defenders of ortho-
dox Trotskyism against Castroite guer-
illaism, the basis of their opposition
to the Mandel-Frank-Mait^ tendency
epitomized by the PRT/ERP is from
the right, proceeding from an appe-
tite for direct reformist collaboration
with their own bourgeoisies.

This canl>e illustrated by examining
Moreno's own history and his ciurrent
positions on Argentina. In 1961 Moreno
wrote:

"Of course, life has brou|^ out the
gaps, omlBBiona and errors of the pro-
gram of Permanent Revolution. . . . The
dogma that only the working class can
accomplish the democratic tasks is
false. Sectors of the urban middle class
and the peasantry are, oo occasioo,tbe
revolutionary leadership. ... His-
tory . . . has rejected the theory that the
proletariat, in the backward countries,
Is the revolutionary leadership. . . . Mao
Tse-tunglsm, or the theory of guerilla
war. Is the particular reflection In the
field of theory of the actual stage of
world revolution. ... [It is necessary
to] synthesize the correct general the-
ory and program (Trotskylst) with the
correct particular theory and program
(Mao Tse-tunglat or CaatrolBt)....[The
state] conserves relative autonomy and
can maneuver between distinct social
classes.. ..There are revolutionary
democratic dictatorships (based on the

peasantry, the people and the proletar-
iat)^"

— N. Ikforeno, La rewtuci&n
latinoatnericana, 1961
This is simply an earlier incama-
Uon of the ideology of the PRT/ERP: the
revolutionary role of the peasantry, the
bankruptcy of the program of perma-
nent revolution, the theory of new
democracy— it is all there, perhaps
even a bit more crudely worded. It
was on the basis, of these theories that
the Moreno group, which until then had
been deeply buried in the Peronist
movement— issuing its magazine Pal-
abra Obrera "under the discipline of
General Perdn and of the Peronist
Supreme Command*— fused with a
petty-bourgeois Castroite group (the
FRIP), which had been active among
Tucuman sugar workers, in 1964 to
form the PRT, official section of the
"United Secret^iat of the Fourth
International.*

During the period 1964-68 the PRT
continued to follow these gueriUaist
policies, and without a single word of
protest from USec leaders. It would
doubtlerss still be doing so today If
some of the well- meaning but naive
militants of the PRT bad not decided
to put Moreno's words into practice,
calling for the transition to armed
struggle in the north. For a time
Moreno went along with the drift, going
so far as to anncMince that *todayOLAS
[Castro's guerilla "International*],
with its national combat organizations
for armed stniggle, is the only or-
ganizational vehicle for power" (N.
Moreno, "La revoluci6n latinoameri-
cana, Argentina y nuestras tareas,*
Estrategia No. 7, September 1968):

But "armed struggle" has a way of
becoming dangerous, so when it waa
clear that a sizeable portion of the PRT
was actually headed toward the fornu-
tlon of a "guerilla army,* Moreno
split the party (1968). Until late 1971
the Moreno group retained the name qt

the PRT and of Its newspaper {La
Vbrdad), while the guerillaists led by
Carlos Ramirez became known by tl^e
title of their organ ^'Comfeahenfe;. How-
ever, having already exhausted the
policies of deep immersion In Peron-
ism and Castroism, Moreno, sensing a
possibility of participating in the elec-
tions as a respectable left party (all
communist parties are banned in Ar-
gentina^ and have been both under
Perdn and the military), began sniffing
around for a new swamp in which to
bury the PRT (Verdad). This was
promptly found in the shape of a wing
of the old ParUdo SociallsU Argentino
(PSA-Argentine Socialist Party, af-
fUiated with the Second International)
led by Juan Carlos Coral. The formal-
ities of a common program were tidily
dealt with in the form of "Basis of
Unification" which has been described
by Joseph Hansen and his co-thinkers
as "consistingessentially of a summary
of Trotskyist positions based on the
theory of permanent revolution" (Ar-
gentina and Bolivia~'The Balance Sheett
1973).

Let us see what the permanent rev-
olution sounds like in the mouths of
these social democrats. In the first
place, it seems that the party must
■tirelessly struggle to bring about a
workers and people's government that
will assure national liberation and the
revolutionary construction of social-
ism." This is simple enough: if Trot-
skyism calls for a workers government
„to achieve socialism, and Stalinism
calls for a people's government to
achieve national liberation— then Just
combine the two for the best of all
possible worlds.' Sixty years of strug-
gle between Stalinism and Trotskyism,
the murder of tens of thousands of
Left Oppositionists, the strangling of
the Chinese, German, French, Spanish
and Vietnamese revolutions— these are
but mere trifles when respectability
can be achieved through painless fusion
with social democracy I

And what about internationalism?
^Vhat of the Fourth International, ih
particxilar? It seems that "while recog-
nizing the need for an International,"
the PSA will not "yield [its] inalienable
right to determine strategy and tactics
to any leadership or tendency that is
not rooted in the proletariat and the
Argentine people." And what about the
program? As good reformists, the PSA
has two: the minimum and maximxmi
programs, which appear in one set of
"demands for immediate struggle* and
another set for "struggle on a perma-
nent basis" (i.e., socialism). One of

the more interesting immediate de-
mands is "for an end to the repressive
role of the armed forces and their
use in the service of capital. ... For
the constitutional right of soldiers and
officers to take part in politics" [our
emphasis]. The PSA envisions reform-
ing the very essence of the capitalist
state, thereby avoiding mentioning
touchy subjects like armed struggle,
workers militias, etc.

Moreno elsewhere referred to this
opportunist swamp as "95 percent Trot-
skyist." Perhaps he can help us to
find the five percent. Is it in the "work-
ers and people's government"? In the
refusal to recognize the authority of
any International which is "not rooted
in... the Argentine people"? Or per-
haps it is the maximum-minimum pro-
gram, a hallmark of reformism? Ls it
the "end to the repressive role of the
armed forces" imder capitalism? Or the
refusal to say one word about armed
stniggle in a country which has been
in a pre-revolutionary situation for
four years?

Having achieved the necessary re-
spectable cover, the "revitalized" "95
percent Trotskyist" PSA (now renamed
the PST) proceeded to throw its total
energies into the election campaign.
At a time when even the PST charac-
terized the situation as "pre-revolu-
tionary," this exclusively electoral ap-
proach can only be called classical
parliamentary Cretinism. Moreover,
instead of running on its own program
the PST devisedanewtactic, the "work-
ers pole." "Take advantage of our legal
status," it declared, offering to put any
bona fide worker on its slate. Are you
left-Peronist, pro-CP, syndicalist?
Never mind, we can all get together in
a single slate and, who knows, perhaps
one day we can all be part of one great
party of the whole class, the kind
Kautsky built, the social democracy.

Uhfoi-tunately, this is still very
"small potatoes* and it still leaves the
mass of the working class under the
control of Peronism. Instead of calling
on the workers to break from Peronism
(how crude and sectarian!), the PSA
offered to vote for the . Justiciallsta
candidates if the FRSJUU ^cket was
made up ot aX least 80 percent workers,
instead of Just 25 percent {Atxinxada
Socialista, 22 November 1972)1 In re-
sponse to Perdn's return last Novem-
ber, the PST newspaper's front page
banner headline read: "sVhy is Per6n
Coming? Hopefully it will be to impose
fighting Workers candidates and not to
make deals with the oligarchy" (Atxtn-
zadd Socialista, 8 November 1972):

It

To believe the words of Moreno and
his group, one could only conclude that
Trotskyism and the whole science of
Marxism simply amount to the method
of finding the highest bidder to sell out
to. In a country where Peronism, a
bourgeois movement, is dominant in the
working class, it is necessary to pose
a sharp class alternative to populism,
not offer to vote for it if 80 percent
of its candidates are labor bureaucrats!
To break the workers from Per6n,

revolutionary communists cma pMpM*
a class united front, ev«o to th« trai-
torous leadership of the COT; «• e«B
demand the formation of a Labor party
With a class-8trugg;le prognun; we can
demand general strikot to Impoae tkc
urgent demands of the workora. But a
working-class united front if aiast the
bourgeoisie can never be «<^ev«(t bjr
making a bloc (open or secret, it tnalCM
no difference) with the leadijic bour-
geois politician. General Per6n! . . .

Build a Legal, Centrist Bourgeois Party?

Eso es lo que explica que, en el momento actual, seamos el polo de
atracci6n de los grupos de izquierda estudiantiles y de la vanguardia obrera.

El Partido Socialista jg la^evolucidn^ Nacional no es mis que una el
en la fornrjacion del partido centrista de jzquierda legal,^ nuestro pfincipal
"objetTvo poli'ticq-organizatiya.ea fiEactuaLjTioment^ En ese sentido debe-
mos buscar una solucion. El Partido Socialista de la Revoluci6n Nacional
debe transformarse en una corriente centrista de izquierda a corto plazo, o
debemos buscar otro acuerdo o unidn que cree esa organizaci6n.

Esa organizaci6n poli'tica legal centrista de izquierda es progresiva
fundamentalmente por su legalidad y su caracter nacional. ^bemos cori-
CieotenMnte- que esa organizarirtn et-4o-opuesto de una proletaria bol--
che^^VI£« VL que nuestra tendencia, por medio de ella y tuchando en ella'

" r/w Socialist Parly of National
Revolution is no more than a stage in
the formation of a legal, left centrist
puny, our main political-
organizational ohjeciive at tfiis time

" '/77/.S left centrist, legal political
organization is progressive
fundamentally because of its legality
and its national character. We are
consciously aware that this
organization is the opposite of a
proletarian Bolshevik organization "

—from Nahuel Moreno, 1954: ano clavo dot poroniaMM

80 Percent
Wbrking-Class Peronism?

^ .^^•^'''^'•n^jrforn^^

"... We have told the Peronisi fighters to try to achieve [a
slate of] 80 percent workers candidates elected hy the rank
«/7t////(' 0/ Justicialismo [the Peronisi party FREJUI.f]and
that, in that case— we will support them."

Proletarian SoUdartty"
with Campora?

"... Without confusing banners. Dr. Campora will he ahle
10 count on our proletarian solidarity — "

—from Avanzada Socialista, 22 November 1972

—from Avanzada Socialista, 30 May-6 Juna 1978

16

A Workers and People's Government?

Por la d«mocratizaci6n

VI

d« la* Fuarzas >

Por la supresion del rol represivo de las Fuerzas
Armadas v su utilizacion al servicio de los intereses
del capital.

Ja reducci6p>^'*'~~*^»;=^il:3r a tres mPfS?-

" I 'or full implementation of democratic i i,i;hi.\

Military out oj the government
CI Constituent Assembly, called under the control

of the workers, to desif^nate
Provisional Horkers and People's Uovernment"

3rganizations,

the workers ^aad
partt^^^^ttlO^,

while recognizing u»
«n International, neither of „
tive committees, nor the party,
yield their inalienable right to d
mine strategy and tactics to any le«a
' ership or tendency that is not roote^
'^s the proletariat and the Argent

pmph&.
Thai <m th.^ basi

VI. For the democratization of
armed forces^ repressive rolel

. fore s and their use inl
of the armed forces

—from "Programa del Partido Socialista de
Argentina," 24 November 1972

—from "Basis of Unification of the PSA-PRT,
Intercontinental Press, 13 November 1972

Peron's wife Isabelita (Maria Estela) with Hector Campora and picture
of Eva, Peron's first wife.

III.

17

Moreno in Argentina, II

Back to Peronism

"PST

Caught

Redhanded

—Workers Vanguard,
No. 49, 19 July 1974

Pact with Peron for
"Law and Order"

In )-ecent months rightist terror in
Argentina has mounted sharply. This is
. seldom reported in the bourgeois me-
dia, which prefer to dwell on kidnap-
pings carried out by leftist guerrillas.
However, in addition to ' the police
"coup" in the interior industrial city
of C6rdoba during February, there have
been a series of shootings, raids, sup^
pressions of newspapers and other
arbitrary acts directed against left-
Peronist and socialist organizations.

Earlier this year General Perdn
closed down the left-Peronist news-
papers El Descamisado and El Mundo.
Offices of the pro-Moscow Communist
Party, of the Maoist Revolutionary
Communist Party (PCR), of the UJS
(Union of Youth for Socialism, youth
group of Polltica Obrera) and of the
PST (Socialist Workers Party) and its
youth group, the AJS (Vanguard Social-
ist Youth), have all been raided by the
police. Left-wing union offices have
been dynamited and attacked with
machine guns by bureaucratic goons.
And in May three militants of the PST,
who had been kidnapped from the office
of their party in a Buenos Aires sub-
urb, were murdered by a gang of 15
rightist thugs. Now, with the death of
"El Lfder" (Per6n) on June 30, this
wave of atrocities will undoubtedly
accelerate.

Under such circumstances, faced
with a wave of rightist terror which has
tacit backing and often direct partici-
pation by the police and army, it is an
elementary necessity of the class
struggle to call for united actions in de-
fense of the left, with the participation
of all socialist organizations as well as
left-Peronist union and youth organiza-
tions. Such actions would include united
demonstrations, armed pickets to de-
fend strikes and the offices of leftist
organizations, and the eventual forma-
tion of a united workers militia based
on the \inions. These united-front ac-

tions would in no way compromise the
necessary political independence of the
various organizations participating.

However, in a display of panic typi-
cal of the frenzied petty bourgeoisie,
the Argentine PST (a sympathizing or-
ganization of the f ake-Trotskyist
"United Secretariat of the Fourth Inter-
national") has gone a very different
path— toward a political bloc with the
Stalinists and bourgeois liberal and
populist parties, in defense of the
'^institutionalization" of bourgeois
legality. This craven capitulation waa
vividly expressed in a joint declaration
by six bourgeois parties, the CP andthe
PST in an audience with General Perdn
at his residence, "Olivos," on March 21.
The declaration promises to adhere to
"the institutional process" (i.e., capi-
talist law-and-order), condemns all
those (such as communists) who seek
to change this process, and calls for
united action (together with the
Radicals and Peronists) against
imperialism!

This preposterous "Declaration of
the 8" is undoubtedly one of the great-
est atrocities perpetrated by an osten-
sibly Trotskyist organization since the
Ceylonese LSSP joined a popular-front
government in 1964. In addition to im-
plying that the very bourgeois forces
which murdered PST * militants and
deposed the left-Peronist C6rdoba gov-
ernment can "institutionalize" democ-
racy and fight imperialism, the Olivos
declaration is, in fact, a forerunner to
a popular front.

We do not have in our possession a
copy of the original statement, but the
excerpts from it printed in Polilica
Obrera (30 March) are more than ade-
quate for an exact appreciation of its
character. The PST now claims, in the
26 June issue of Avanzada Socialista,
that it never signed the document ap-
parently because it couldn't get a good
enough "deal" from the bourgeois par-
ties and the Stalinists on the wording
(see Intercontinental Press, 15 July).
However, at most this can only have to
do with a formal signature, since the

18

lUUTANT

Juan Carlos Coral

PST very definitely did participate in
the Olivos meeting (we print a picture
of the PST's ubiquitous Juan Carlos
Coral along with the rest of the eight
at the audience with Per6n) whose pur-
pose was to present the declaration to
the president. In any case, it is,
to say the least, unusual that Avanzada
Socialista reported the PST as having
signed the declaration in its edition of
28 March. Despite the vehement public
attack by the Polftica Obrera group on
the PST because of this act AS did not
see fit to publish a "rectification" of
its "editorial error" untilthree months
later'.

In the text presented to Perfinby the
eight parties we read that the partici-
pants in the Olivos meeting support "in
all instances the institutional process
and, at the same time, condemn all
those who in one way or another attempt
to change it." In the first place the
reader notes repeated references to
"institutionalization," "the institutional
process" and the like. Evidently even
the double-talking PST has trouble
speaking of bourgeois democracy in
Per6n's Argentina^ And secondly, whom
exactly does the declaration condemn?
No doubt the "ultrarightists." But, then,
not only the right-wing Peronist thugs
and fascists wish to change the institu-
tional process of bourgeois democracy
—so, too, would any self-respecting
Marxist.

As for the tasks ahead, the PST
has something quite different from
proletarian revolution in mind. Accord-
ing to the declaration:

"The difficult moments which await the
Republic, as a consequence of its con-
frontation with the powers which have
subjected it from long ago, can be over-
come victoriously with solidarity in
action of the sectors which respect the
majority and popular will for liberation
[asj expressed in the elections. . .
"The realization of a true federalism of
the national community, Latin Ameri-
can integration,, solidarity with the
subjected peoples of the world and the
fight against imperialism and the oli-
garchy can be materialized only with
the creative agreements [coincidencias J
which grow out of the full exercise of
democracy in all areas ..."
After piercing through the byzantihe
rhetoric, the only possible meaning
one can get from this passage is that
the Peronists, Radicals and other
liberal/populist capitalist parties, to-
gether with the CP and PST, can fight
against imperialism and the oligarchy
. . . provided, of course, they achieve
those "creative agreements" which re-
sult from bourgeois democracyl

Such an open rejection of the Marx-
ist principle of working-class inde-
pendence from the bourgeoisie, the
implicit belief that the bourgeoisie can
fight against imperialism (and there-
fore that Trotsky's theory of perma-
nent revolution is false), and the ex-
plicit agreement to abide by the rules
of the "institutional process" (not even
bourgeois democracy!)— even for the
unprincipled USec, such a document is
a little extreme. Yet to date, no sec-
tion of the "Trotskyist" United Sec-
retariat has publicly stated its
disagreement!

The USec majority has reportedly
sent an internal letter to its sections
in which it demands that the PST
clarify its position on the document,
or else be expelled. Tliis is only natual,
since the PST sides with the reformist
USec minority led by the SWP. What
better way to get at the SWP than to
saddle it with this betrayal by its Ar-
gentine cothinkers? Butwhatof the mil-
itant workers in Argentina itself, who
have at least two organizations sym-
pathizing with the United Secretariat
to choose from (the PST and the "Red
Faction" of the ERP/PRT)? Certainly
they might be interested to know where
the "Fourth International" stands on
this important issue. Not to mention
would-be Trotskyists around the world.

As for the SWP, it is prepared to
denounce kidnappings of U.S. business-
men carried out by the ERP/PRT, at
the time the official Argentine section
of the USec, within hours of their oc-
currence. Yet it took the weekly 40-
p a g e-plus Intercontinental Press a
quarter of a year to even mention the
Olivos declaration.

The Spartacist League denounces the
declaration by the /Argentine PST (So-
cialist Workers Party), Communist
Party and six bourgeois liberal and
populist parties as an obscene reform-
ist capitulation. Whether or not the
Coral/Moreno leadership of the PST
may have had reservations or dis-
agreement^ at the time (or quite likely
only now, after receiving a letter from
some unnamed "European companero*
asking for "clarification"), they cannot
deny that they were prepared in princi-
ple to enter a bloc for law and order
with the bourgeoisie. The PST is re-
vealed as an enemy of the workers]

We have in the past denounced sim-
ilar betrayals by the PST as when, at a
similar meeting between the Peronist
President-elect Cimpora the bourgeois
parties and CP, Juan Carlos Coral
stated the PST's support for the "posi-

19

tive measures" of the new government
and declared his "proletarian solidar-
ity" with CSmpora ("Argentina: The
Struggle Against Peronism," WVHo. 24,
6 July 1973). Like the scandalous
Olivos declaration, this "critical sup-
port" for a bourgeois government has
never been denounced in the public
prjess of the United Secretariat. No
doubt, however, after Mandel has

squeezed the last drop of factional
advantage from the affair, and the PST
is duly efxpelled or walks out of the
USec, he will then turn around and write
one of those lucid explanations of his
ex-affiliates' betrayals (his article
on the Ceylonese LSSP is a model)
in which he denounces everything . . .
except his own, and the USec's, cul-
pability in the betrayal. ■

Institutionalization: Now and Forever

l..e .o«o«>- S0Cja..s.a^
I party. ^

oatty m ,„ppotte the P j,^
"«"'^r*a?«e.upp°"«'*''

mo .to demand

from tbe g" coup by f^'^ per^^^s^
C6rdoba, ^ along ^ ^ic-

g-^^^nf opposition ;o ;Ses oi
ating T called ^°\^^aiation of
tato^^^?; ^^^^^ as the of the

measures »^ democta-t***^ ^ ^1^.
the social optiaiio" of tn

-^^°r\TdVeT-P-^^^^temands -
g^^^^^^ are the t^^in, in the

'T^^'^ . J when once aga
-^"^^tt of General Fer6n s

aftermath ° ^ed our ^^a^ization"

th* attaches ot

• a of this process

:r-rpS--'-r;

— from "Institutionalization' and Rightist Threat," Avanzada Socialista, 4 July
1974, translated in Intercontinental Press, 22 July 1974

Did They or Didnl They: Three Months Later

28 de ^ ^°^JUnfo en "^"^s-
''''^ <ie suoT''°-^ ab"/" ^^^^^^^

^°^regi,.jo p de Ja rf^°"^es-

Junio.j edicibn deJ ^'"^^

* ^ ^6 de

—from En Defensa del PST y la Verdad, "
statement by Executive Committee of the PST, 20
August 1974, in Intercontinental Press, 16
September 1974

—from In Defense of the PST and the Truth,"
statement by Executive Committee of the PST, 20
August 1974, translated In Intercontinental Press,
9 September 1974

HOW tiien did tb^ a

VJe acknowledge j^^arv^ada So-
iv to blame for tnis ^^p.
ciaUdidpub^f^^^^^^^^
posed common d°^^ r, U included
28-April 5 issue. This was

a list of s^PP^'^^^Tthe delay m

tdXislon interview. A P .^^^^^^
aune 26 issue. ^

PST's Coral (third from right) at presentation of "Declaration of 8" to
Peron (third from left).

What's in a Word

«e no« fee aamad<5 l» aten^iiSji sobre
el parti^Jular, lo estarrios estvEdia«(io.
Llamamos a todos los sectores del
movimiento trotskista a considerar
tambi^n esta cuestibn, teniendo en
cuenta la situaci6n cancreta de la Ar-
gentina, incluyendo el significado que
ha adquirido la palabra "instituciona-
lizaci6n".2

Si es necesaria una.^i^ii£cci6n,^
V.^

Idgfa p^lto a^^j949, durante ■

SU p]

En Argentina, las fuerzas feaccio-
narias tratan de revertir el "proceso
de institucionalizaci6n". Es por eso
que este punto ha pasado a ser uno
de los problemas mds importantes de
la lucha de clases en ese pais. — iP

mnmuM agm, ^^^^^ ^^.y,..,^

te^«oj been called to this, ,ve
ftAve begtln discussing the matter V/e
appeal to other sectors of the Trotslej.-
ist movement to also consider this
question, bearing in mind the con-
crete situation in ArgenUna, includin,
the meaning acquired by the wore
W inshtucionalizacidn. " 2

fg revoiu-

2. "Institutionalization" fuid the "process
of institutionalization" have acquired a
special meaning in current Aj rfjentine pol-
itics.

1949, duringjjis first r^swce, Peroi
, .^^^*sjr

,-«i^iati?:-^^« Vo^Ss^o

''-- an acute "o„e^"^,Xrr

^ cjass stru. ^gjg

-from "En Defensa del PST y la Verdad," Ibid.

If You Believe This..

popular,

que°e'l e?rof deXll'^T'"'"' ^'^^a''-^

a la s gurnrc '^f"'^'^'^^^"
'OS ocho unc
^^-^era una decJarao f
P^^««nt6unproyeeto^^" ^
P^opuso una^er7e?ecamr°^^^"^°
Parcialmente ""'^^^^ fue-
'•«dacci6n crey6 ^nT""'' ^"^^^^^
'^^rrar nuestra ^dicMn "'^'"^"fo de
"^«nto ilevabalaT^^' ^^^cu-

no habia sido r ^^a""

^"TOplimos en
^«fa redaccion con ri^""'^^

firm,

-from El PST No Firmo Declaracion de los
Avanzada Socialista, 26 June 1974 in
Intercontinental Press, 22 July 1974

«g«ir... P-P-'" c. «r

parties P^°P°jf„, ^presented a duaft.
tion be made, an 1 « P ^^g.

Our party P^^P^'-^lv ^'eepted. A t the
esthat wereparually -^^^^ ^^^^^.^^

\Tthat the document bor..
staff though that^the ^^.^^^

the signature .^y^^^^"^" dually, it was
de los Traba;adore _ Actual y, ^

not signed becavise there was

agreement with lit cotnplete

•was made with regt^t"
ture.

—from "No PST Signature on Statement Handed trj
Peron," Avanzada Sociali sta, 26 June 1 974, translate d
in Intercontinental Press, 15 July 1974

22

"SWP

'Irans;9ates'
Oorar

— Workers Vanguard,
No. 62, 14 February 1975

The wave of rightist terror which
engulfed Argentina following the death
of President Juan Per6n last July l has
resulted in more than one political
murder per day, a total of 227 in 1974.
Many, perhaps most, of these assassi-
nations are carried out by special
squads of plain-clothes military and
police officials.

In this perilous situation it is vital
for revolutionaries not only to call for
united -front defense of left and militant
trade -union organizations, but also to
warn the -masses against placing any
confidence in the treacherous anti-
working class Peronist regime. The
Partido Socialista de los Trabajadores
(PST— Socialist Workers Party) has
done precisely the opposite, seeldng to
protect its'elf by repeated expressions
of support for the "process of institu-
tionalization" and for the "continuity^
of the government. While seven of its
own members were gunned dpwn by
pro -government thugs last year^ the
PST continues to proclaim tiiat the
main danger is a coup d'6tat.'

Workers Vanguard was the first
publication outside Argentina U> pub-
licly call attention to the scandalous
behavior of the (purportedly Trotsky -
1st) PST which issued, together with the
local Stalinists and six bourgeois par-
ties, a declaration calling for bourgeois
law and order on the occasion of a
meeting with Per6n last March 21 (see
"PST Caught Redhanded," W No. 49,
19 July 1974). The declaration supports
"in all instances the institutional pro-
cess" and condenms "all those who in
one way or another attempt to change
it"

This expression of support for the
capitalist state is a betrayal of the most
fundamental Marxist principles so
gross that even the professional hypo-
crites of the "United Secretariat of the
Fourth International," of which the
PST is a sympathizing organization,
finally made a public protest. However,
for appearance's sake, tiie USec "ac-
knowledged" the PST's cock-and-bull
»tory that its representative, Juan
Carlos Coral, did not sign the document
even though the PST newspaper {Avan-
xada Socialista) reproduced the docu-
ment as having been signed by him.
This "editorial error" was not correct-
ed by AS for a full three months:

Moreover, only a few days after this
"correction" was published the PST
attended another meeting of "the eight,"
ttis time with the General's wife (and
▼ice president) Marfa Estela, as Per6n
lay dying. A second declaration was is-
sued, declaring ttie participants' "sup-
port for the process of institutionaliza-
tion, ..." Challenged by the USec lead-

ership, the PST again answered that
Coral bad oot actually signed the
statement.

The PST supported the declaration's
content, however, with the excuse that
"the word 'institutionalization'
has aquired a meaning in Argentine pol-
itics different from the one given in the
dictionary. It has become a synonym
of fighting to defend or win democratic
rights" {Avanzada Socialista , 4 July
1974). In fact, "institutionalization" in
the mouths Argentine liberals and the
PST social democrats has been used to
mean support for bourgeois law and or-
der, as against the terrorism of the
police . . . and of left-wing Peronist and
supposedly Marxist guerrillas.

Unable to stay away from these pres-
tl^ous "summit" meetings of the bour-
geois parties, the ubiquitous Coral at-
tended yet another such gathering,
called "the multisectorial," on October
8. As we reported in Workers Vanguard
No. 57 (22 November .1974), be toW
President Maria Estela de Per6n that
the PST "will fight for the continuity of
this government, because it was elected
by the majority of the Argentine work-
ers and because it permits the exer-
cise of some democratic liberties. . . ."

Coming less than two weeks alter the
regimens new "security law" outlawing
strikes (a measure the PST leader
failed to criticize, althou^ he
pla^d[ed] without reservation" many
clauses of the government's labor leg-
islation), and given his "categorical"
denunciation o^"te^rorist and gutrril-
laist forms of violence," it is not sur-
prising that Coral's speech to the
••multisectorial" was widely inter-
preted by press and television as sup-
port for the government. However, ac-
cording to the 15 October Avanzada
Socialista the version of the speech
<listributed by the government's press
office contained "omissions" which
altered its meaning; therefore AS pub-
lished a "textual reconstruction" of
Coral's words.

As a "fraternal service" to the PST,
its ally in the factional battle raging
In the USec, the SWP recently pub-
lished an English version of Coral's
statement (Intercontinental Press , 13
January). However, IP apparently did
a little "reconstructing" itself in order
to spruce up the key passage.. ^

For the most part the English trans-
lation accurately reproduces the Span-
ish text. Coral repeats his "firm con-
demnation of the death of the latest
victim of the terror, who happens to be
an officer of the armed forces," an-
nounces that "all inhabitants of the
country should bear the consequences
equally* if there is a grave national

23

emergency, equates guerrillaism to
coups d'§tat ("although the aims are
different"), etc.

But wh6n we come to the section in
which Coral announces that the PST
''lucharS por la continuidad de este
gobierno" ("will fight for the continuity
of this government"), this is rendered
as: ". . . will fight to keep this govern-
ment's term of office from being cut
sliort illegitimately . . ."1 This is some-
thing quite different.' Apparently Joseph
Hansen, liketoralfc Co. , feels thatdic-
'tionaries are inadequate to interpret
what the PST is saying.

Lenin and Trotsky repeatedly
stressed the need to defend democratic
•rights and oppose bonapartist coups.
However, the PST "translates" this in-
to supporting "bourgeois democracy,"
"institutionalization" (including against
leftist guerrillas) and the "continuity"
of the present government. Aside from
(the fact that the "democracy" of the
bonapartist Peronist regime is in any
case quite limited, such a statement
can mean nothing but political support
for the government and for the parlia-
mentary form of bourgeois class
dictatorship. ■

"For the Continuity of this Government.

—from text of Coral's statement at the
Multisectoriai; in Avanzada Socialista, 15 October
1974

— from Coral's Statement at the t\/lultisectoral, '
Avanzada Socialista, 15 October 1974, translated in
Intercontinental Press, 13 January 1975

Mirror image": A Despicable Statement

—from Declaracion del PST, ' Executive Committee
statement issued at the Multisectoral,' Avanzada
Socialista, 10 October 1974

— from PST Statement at the Multisectoral ,"
translated in Intercontinental Press, 28 October 1974

24

Moreno's Left Face

Elsewhere in this' bulletin we reprint numerous excerpts
from materials documenting Nahuel Moreno's decades-
long cover for Peronism iti his native Argentina; his
opportunist support to populist generals from Peru's
Velasco to Panama's Torrijos; his chameleon-like shifts of
political coloration, from gung-ho guerrillaist to snivelling
social democrat; and his scandalous financial dealings. But
that does not account for the apparent leftism of the
documents of his Bolshevik Faction and its predecessor,
the Bolshevik Tendency (BF/BT). For in the case of
Moreno the contrast between theory and practice is so
dramatic that he has developed a "method" capable of
justifying almost any betrayal.

For almost a decade, from 1968 through 1977. the
United Secretariat was rent by acute factional struggle
between a centrist International Majority Tendency (I MT)
led by Ernest Mandel and the reformist Leninist-Trotskyist
Faction (LTF) led by the American SWP of Joe Hansen/
Jack Barnes and (initially) Moreno's Argentine PST.
While the Mandelites chased after a Maoist/Guevarist
"new mass vanguard" in Europe and Latin America, the
F I F used pseudo-orthodox arguments to attack guerrilla-
ism from the right (not unlike the pro-Moscow CPs). After
Barnes and Mandel dissolved the factions in 1977,
underlying differences remained but a temporary unity was
obtained at the USec helm. So simply by standing still
while the ex-lMT galloped to the right, Moreno suddenly
appears as a "left" critic of the "reunified" rotten bloc:

"Before, it [the IMT] had bent to the ultraleftism of a
predominantly student radicalized vanguard. Now, it is
bending to the pressures of Eurocommunism and a trade-
union and middle class vanguard, which are transmission
belts for liberal ideology and the public opinion of the
imperialist countries

"This capitulation is what has made the convergence
between the ex-lMT and the leaders of the SWP, i.e., the
ex-LTF, possible."

— "Declaration and Platform of the Bolshevik

Faction," [SWP] International Internal

Discussion Bulletin, July 1979

An uninitiated reader might well confuse such passages
with Frotskyist critiques of the revisionist USec by the
international Spartacist tendency (iSt). Of course, the iSt
and its precursors have been denouncing the United
Secretariat as a rotten bloc since its inception in 1 963, while
Moreno seems to have discovered this fact only in the last
two years (after being part of every USec betrayal and
unprincipled maneuver for the previous decade and a half).
And there is the telltale fact that Moreno's BF/BT
consistently described the Mandelite majority as "ultraleft"
while we label the IMT centrist. But the most striking
difference is that the Morenoite attack on the USec
leadership consists solely of organizational atrocity stories
plus evidence of revisionism at the most general theoretical
level. Concrete political betrayals, where their line means
defeat for the working class, are almost never mentioned.

The Bolshevik Faction has had some pretty harsh words
to say against the USec's 1977 resolution on "Socialist
Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat." In a
document endorsed by the BG, Moreno says it "completely
revised the revolutionary Marxist position on the dictator-
ship of the proletariat." Mandel, he says, is "filling the''
Marxist conception of workers revolution and proletarian
dictatorship with a Eurocommunist contentiand program
..." ( The Revolutionary Dictatorship of the Proletariat
[1979]). Fine, but where do the Morenoites denounce the
USec for capitulating to the Eurocommunists in the class
struggle? What about the electoral support to popular
fronts given by both the SWP and ex-lMT. who call for
votes to the reformist workers parties involved in such
class-collaborationist coalitions? The BF doesn't breathe a
word of criticism, for its own electoral policies are just as
'(or even more) tailist.

Perhaps the best example of how Morenoite
"orthodoxy" in the abstract is translated into opportunism
in the concrete is the case of Portugal 1975. During the
spring and summer the situation was polarizing rapidly: the
ruling Armed Forces Movement (MFA) and its Stalinist
allies escalated their leftist rhetoric, in part to co-opt
embryonic factory committees and collective farms which
were beginning to sprout up. On the other side, the
Socialist Party of Mario Soares sided with more conserva-
tive officers and civilian reactionaries in mounting an anti-
Communist mass mobilization. The SWP. in response,
wholeheartedly took up the cause of the CIA-financed
Portuguese SP. Not wanting to be tied to this right-wing
.unholy alliance. Moreno began making trouble in the
Leninist- frotskyist Faction and finally split over the SWP
document. "Key Issues in the Portuguese Revolution"
(October 1975). This was the origin of the Bolshevik
I endency.

The future Biers were hard on the SWP. accusing it of
thinking "the possibility exists that the SP could break with
the bourgeoisie and take power in Portugal today." and
that the SP is "no longer counterrevolutionary" ("Letter
from Former LTF Members to the International Executive
Committee." [SWP] Internal Information Bulletin. March
1977). The "Declaration of the Bolshevik Tendency" took
the L I F to task because it "did not indicate a single task or
slogan in relation to the 'workers commissions'." and
condemned Hansen's "categorical refusal to raise the
policy and sloan for centralizing these committees." The
SWP. concluded the BT, had "an essentially bourgeois-
democratic program" for Portugal ([SWP] IIDB. January
1977). These same points were made repeatedly — and
much more sharply — in Workers Vanguard (e.g.. "S^P/
OC! Jail Counterrevolution in Portugal," Wk'No. 75, 29
August 1975).

But WV emphasized above all the need to fight "class
collaboration — tying the workers to the bourgeois offieer

25

corps." On the issue of Soviets, we said that for an authentic
Trotskyist party the key issue was "caUing for independ-
ence of the workers commissions and popular assembhes
from the M FA ..." ("Soviets and the Struggle for Workers
Power in Portugal." No. 82, 24 October 1975). The
program of Moreno & Co. was exactly the opposite.
Having decided to abandon the social-democratic camp (in
the early summer he was for participating in the SP's anti-
Communist demonstrations), Moreno simply switched
horses and plunked his money down for the MFA. Thus in
a long polemic against SWPer Gus Horowitz he argued
that this faction of the officer corps of the capitalist army
was not classically bonapartist and was "Kerenskyist" and
petty-bourgeois (N. Moreno, "Revolucion y contrarrevo-
lucion en Portugal," Revista de America, July-August
1975).

Moreno's supporters of the Portuguese PRT went even
further, and in an article entitled "A Necessary Recitifica-
tion: The M FA and the Revolution in Portugal" ( Comhate
Socialisia. 10 July 1975) discovered a "semi-soviet sector"
of the bourgeois officer caste. But they did not come up
with this dangerous revision of Marxism by themselves. In
an April 1975 report to the PRT national committee
Moreno referred to the MFA as "the superstructural
expression of the beginning of the formation of Soviets in
the army" and says that it may be "a petty-bourgeois
movement that reflects the revolutionary process"— in
which case, "We have to struggle within this process, and
understand that there are differentiations inside the Armed
Forces Movement itself" (PRT Internal Discussion
Bulletin No. 2). So while correctly attacking the SWP for
chasing after Soares and raising a purely bourgeois-
democratic program for Portugal, Moreno talks about
Soviets... and runs after the populist MFA with its
demagogic talk of "people's power."

Moreno has developed this Janus-faced policy into a
veritable science. Thus on the second issue over which he
broke from the SWP — Angola — he takes his former
mentors severely to task for failing to call for military
victory to the M PLA in the crucial months after November
1975, when it was facing a combined attack by South
Africa and the CIA-aided FNLA/UNITA coalition.
Moreno drew a close parallel between Angola and Vietnam
(falsely, for in the case of Angola it was simply an

wv Photo

Spartacist League took sides in Vietnam war.
SWP refused to call for NLF victory.

imperialist invasion, whereas in Vietnam this was overlaid
on a civil war which saw two opposing c/fliw camps). But for
Moreno this parallel presented certain problems, for in
Vietnam the SWP also did not call for tnilitary victory to
the NLF. Instead its line was bourgeois pacifism, appealing
to the defeatist wing of the Democratic Party. And the PST
vociferously defended the SWP's antiwar policies when
they were bloc partners in the LTF. (Moreno also
fulminated against the "ultraleft sectarians" of the
Spartacist League who said the SWP's coalitions were
mini-popular fronts, and who uniquely demanded "All
Indochina Must Go Communist!")

What to do? For an old hand like Moreno the trick was
simple: to call for an NLF victory was a "world strategy"
while "Bring the Boys Home" was its "tactical adaptation"
to the backward consciousness of the American masses.
Thus, "Some comrades of the IMT severely criticized the
SWP for not raising in the U.S. the demand 'Victory to the
NLF.' They were wrong in identifying the international
policy with national tactics and demands" (N. Moreno,
Angola: La revolucion negra en marcha[l9n]). So as long
as you vote for a USec resolution, which is buried in the
documents section of Intercontinental Press {and which no
one can pin on you anyway, since both the SWP and PST
are only "fraternally related" to the USec), it is alright to
fail to call for the defeat of one's "own" imperialism. Glory,
hallelujah, the bloc with Democratic Senator Vance
Hartke is principled, and there is no need to get beaten up
by pro-war workers while distributing defeatist propagan-
da in front of the factories (as happened to the Bolsheviks
in World War 1). How convenient. Why didn't Jack Barnes
think of that?

Moreno dreamed up a similar subterfuge a few years
earlier when the LTF got into a shouting match with the
IMT over who supported popular frontism: the LTF said
Mandel and his friends did, by supporting the French
Union of the Left; the IMT said Hansen/ Moreno did.
because their Uruguayan supporters called for a vote to the
Frente Amplio (Broad Front). (Answer: both support
popular frontism.) Moreno argued that the Uruguayans
had made an "error, not a betrayal." Furthermore, "it was a
good move to enter the Frente Amplio because it helped
our work in the mass movement." You see, "It would
indeed be a betrayal to electorally support a popular front
or a bourgeois nationalist movement without denouncing
it as a betrayer of the workers' movement. That is: voting in
itself is for us a tactical and not a principled question" (N.
Moreno, "A Scandalous Document — A Reply to Ger-
main," [SWP] /JOB, January 1974).

Moreno didn't invent that one, however. The author is
Andres Nin. Even after the Spanish POU M participated in
the Popular Front coalition during the February 1936
elections, Nin, its most left-wing leader, continued to
denounce the Popular Front in the abstract. For example:
"Hence the policy of the Popular Front, by presenting the
problem as a struggle between bourgeois democracy and
fascism, sows fatal illusions among the working masses
and detours them from accomplishing their historic
mission, preparing, by this very act, the victory of
fascism."

— "La accion directa del proletariado y la

revolucion espanola," July 1936, in A. Nin, Los
problemas de la revolucion espanola (1931-1937)

Not bad, on paper. But the POUM helped put the Popular
Front in power, thereafter acting as its left tail while

26

mouthing abstract slogans about "socialism or fascism."
And when the showdown came in the Barcelona May Days
ol 1937, Nin refused to mobilize the workers to overthrow
the fragile Popular Front, thereby "preparing the victory of
fascism." Presumably Nin, too. thought "voting is a tactical
question."

Not so the international Spartacist tendency, for whom
opposition to class collaboration is a matter of principle.

[ his is what distinguishes us not only from the misnamed
"Bolshevik Faction" but the entire United Secretariat
swamp. Although as a cynical con man Nahuel Moreno
resorts to the eclectic "method" ofcentrism — what Trotsky
called "crystallized confusion" — his appetites and real
program are those of a hardened reformist, in either case,
as the example of Nin shows, the end result is the same, and
it is the working class that pays the price.

Portugal

LeR Criticism of SWP.

—from "Letter from Former LTF Members to tfie
International Executive Committee," SWP
Internal Information Bulletin, March 1977

transform them inM duS^^^

, The change i„ ,u ^'"^ ^ '-i*^ thtUuS

^°<^ent entiuS 4" ^r'^'- policy

t^on," which if r^^y '««uea of fS. *^^t4 u ^

°'fana of dual po^^ ^^?»<>nat,atioJ. ^^^^^^^^ mJ
workers and - Tl"^^* and f«Il •"»l>«yo«i«
transitional '^^*er, comr.l^r/^^'tory occud-STT

thZ v^"^ power ;r

f t*>e workers and - Tl"^^* '""d and fm^" ""^ •"»'>«yo«k

—from "Declaration and Platform of the Bo(»h*\^
Faction," SWP International Internal Di»cus»lon

Bulletin, July 1979

...support to the IVIFA

—from Nahuel Moreno, "Revolucion
y contrarevolucion en Portugal,"
Revista de America, July-August
1975, translated in SWP Internal
Information Bulletin, March 1977

1 ' officers towarH «

T^^^^^^^i^^-^y >^tHe

uma rectificapao necessaria

0 MFA e 0 RevolucOo
em Portugal

Ate hoje sempre caracterizamos o MFA como um movimento burgues, defen-
sor, na ausencia de qualquer partido estruturado da classe dominante ou sequer
de um aparelho de Estadp solido, dos interesses fundamentals do Capital, se bem
que tambem rhuitas vezes obrigado, pela posiqao de arbitro «supra-partidario»
em que se encontra colocado. a castigar os sectores tradicionalmente mais privi-
legiados da burguesia, pdr forma a defender os interesses globais dessa mesma
classe.

A Necessary Rectification

The MFA and the Revolution In Portugal

"Upto now we always characterized the MFA [A/meJ Forces
Movement] as a hourf^eois movement, a defender, in the absence oj any
struct ut-ed party of the ruling class or even a solid state apparatus, oj the
fundamental interests of capital. .. . "

" The product of these traits [of the Portuf^uese revolutionary process]
w as, in a way, the M FA. We can understand it as a new phenomenon,
that is. a momentary result of a very particular reality.. the reality of the
Portufiuese Revolution, ft w as initially a movement, a petty-bourgeois
reaction of a sector of the officials of an army pounded hv w ar and
massacred hy the military defeat in A frica.

"In the .same w ay as the working-clans partie.s of the coalition, the
M FA participates in and commits it.self to the policy of the hourf^eois
jUivernment. But this does not mean identifying^ the government and the
armed forces, nor identifying the MFA with the bourgeoisie. On the
u'onirary. the facts are demonstrating that . . . the worsening of the crisis
■f/eepens the cleavages within the MFA and the semi-soviet tendency
implied by one of its poles..:." ■

-^from Combate Sbcialista (newspaper of tfie Morenoite
Portuguese PRT), 10 July 1975

portugues.

zer,
jnna

npcmn luprra.

cionaPe internaaonal

da crise anmf,.nw ' ^Qravamento

transmite ao GovS no 'i'"
iunto, o que leva o bonaS°-!!^o'°"
^"•Qariigmai^.fi -io

28

Angola

Posici6n del psT
insistido

MPLA no me^^J^* « «■

t«flia de que este lUtimo, en el caso de veneer
mente a Franco, pudiera transfomaree en un

fascista'.

Hasta el 11 de noviembre el principal engnugoj
a«M de Angola eran laa tropaa & toniales portu-

ml^ariqablanco8jj.Q^^
gi^^wSBatiriaajL!^^
I:7::=^*i;;^ii7inji intervencito acUva de laa masaa

rritorio angblefto. U intervenci6n
efTiSThidiledauna dinAmica PJ''^* "T^^

" r/iiis ilw position of ihe PST is perfectly clear: previously w e
hiul insisted in calling for the end to the fratricidal war [between
the M PLA. FN LA and UN IT A] in order to expel Portuf^uese
iiuperialism: beginning w ith the South African jimperiahst
invasion the semiofficial line of the PST. as put forward in its
newspaper Avanzada Socialista. . . . was the following: The
VI PLA does not merit the slightest confidence from
revolutionaries — '

"Until II November [1975] the main enemy of the Angolan
masses was the Portuguese colonial troops, and the most urgent
task was to obtain their withdrawal. Once they had withdrawn, the
main enemy becanie the pro-imperialist forces of Zaire, South
Africa and the white mercenaries, and no goal was more decisive
and urgent than to combat them and force them to leave Angolan
territory "

—from N. Moreno, Angola: La revolucion negra en
marcha (1977)

For and Against SWP Antiwar
Popular Fronts

buenejtmpio

"For us it is painful to confess our long-standing
admiration for the SWP. especially for its policies
toward the Vietnam war. We have gone hack to reread
its press and resolutions in order to corroborate our
assertions. The e.xtremely bad legal conditions in our
country prevented us from completeing this rereading,
hut as far as we could tell the SWP policy did not
follow the lines which we have laid out —

"//; order to mobilize the working-class and mass
movement in the United States against the colonial war
it was necessary to understand their political back-
wardness. For this reason, in the case of the Vietnam
war. the SWP wisely formulated its demands, 'Out of
Vietnam Now!' and 'Bring the Troops Home Now!' Of
course, these just demands mobilized millions of
/persons.

"However, a national demand, however just, cannot
replace a world strategy and policy. For example, the
two famous demands of the S WP were correct, as long
as they were in the framework of a truly international-
ist and Trotsky is t overall policy. Thus they should
constitute the tactical and agitational adaptation, to
the level of consciousness of the American masses, of
the world strategic demand: 'For the Defeat of the U.S.
For Total Victory to the Vietnamese NLF.'..."

—from N. Moreno, Angola: La revolucion negra
en marcha (1977)

29

It appears to us that the IMT lead-
ers do have a serious political dif-
ference with us. They seem to he op-
posed in principle to limited agree-
ments or public actions involving
bourgeois sectors in the struggle
against fascism or other ultr.areaction-
ary forces. We think that they are not
alone in taking an ultraleft position
of this kind.

We should like to remind them that
at the height of the antiwar move-
ment in the United States, quite a few
petty-bourgeois and even bourgeois
figures sought to share the platform
in the giant rallies that were staged
at the time. The Trotskyists in the

United States did not oppose this. In
fact, they favored it.

But how the ultralefts screamed!
They considered this to be proof posi-
tive that the Socialist Workers party
had formed an Interclass political
bloc" with the liberal wing of the Dem-
ocratic party, thereby falling into the
Social Democratic "policy" of class col-
laborationism. It is one of the main
"proofs" still thrown at the SWP by
the ultralefts hi the United States (and
elsewhere) to bolster the charge that
the SWP has "degenerated," turned "re-
formist," and "betrayed" the working
class.

—from PST/LTF, "In Reply
to the IMT's Open Letter
Number 2," Intercontinental
Press, 20 January 1975

Eurocommunism

Perialista. Con la^ 2^, ^""^
directas con 61 la^\^^^

sovi4ticos, sin dejar a

"Finally, [PSTer Marcela] Rvdjiguez [wriiing on 'The Carter Plan:
New Counterrevolutionary Policy" in Revista de America No. i]
indicates that for Yankee imperialism raising the banner of human
rights in the Workers states, and its encouragement of opponents of the
bureaucracy, is an important part of the imperialist plan against the
workers states.

" These considerations, which we share, locale Eurocommunism, or
the process of social-democratization of the CPs, in a broader
dimension. It has to do with the two faces of the imperialist plan — with
establishing direct ties in order to guarantee governments of 'democratic
counterrevolution' a . la Soares to hold back the upsurge of the
European workers movement

"In this second aspect, the position of the European CPs in support of
the Soviet dissidents, while retaining its positive aspects, contributes to
reinforcing the imperialist plan. Mandel sees in this support to Soviet
-xlissidents one of the fundamental causes of friction between the
Eurocommunist parties and the Stalinist apparatus. "

— from Eugenio Greco, "Eurocommunism: A New Crisis of World
Stalinism," Revista de America, August 1977

Greco's arbitrary approach has tilready
apparently led him to flirt with positions
that are really different from those of the
rest of the Trotskyist movement and would
lead iiim very far astray if he developed
them consiBtently. He does this when he
says that the Eurocommunist CFb' detenie
of the dissidents against bureaucratic
repression promotes an "imperialist plan"
against the workers states, and when he
makes statements indicating that the
"Eurocommunist Ct^s are becoming a bat-

tering ram for imperialism against the
economic underpinnings of these states.

Greco is not the first to advance these
positions. Among those claiming to be
Trotskyist, the award for originality goes

to' such sectarian groups as the apartaast
Lgague in the United States and the

•Workers Revolutionary Party in Britain.
Cfet us hope that Greco proves capable of
seeing the deadly logic involved and that
he draws back in time.

—from Gerry Foley,
"Eurocommunism,
Goldilocks, and the Three
Bears: In Reply to Eugenio
Greco," Intercontinental
Press, 5 December 1977

Opportunist Chameleon
Sui Generis

excerpted from:

Trotskyism
Rearms"

— Spartacist, No. 20, April-
May 1971

The intei-national Trotskyist move-
ment stands before its definitive cross-
roads. The revisionist currents which
have dominated world Trotskyism over
the past period are in crisis. In the
aftermath of recent developments, most
particularly the May-June 1968 explo-
sion of the French working class which
stunningly demonstrated anew the
bankruptcy of the impressionists who
had abandoned the prbletarian interna-
tionalist strategy for revolution, the re-
visionists find themselves as challenged
by authentic Trotskyism as do the Mao-
ists and other non-Marxist currents.
Even the most ardent revisers of Trot-
skyist theory are now finding them-
selves compelled to argue on the ter-
rain of Leninism grown rusty and dis-
torted in their minds by years of abuse,
abandonment and betrayal. The con-
glomerations which for years have mas-
queraded as international political ten-
dencies are forced willy-nilly into re-
opening the disagreements which had
long laid buried by mutual consent.
New currents are seeking the answers
to the questions : what went wrong with
the Fourth International? how can an
authentic Trotskyist politics be con-
structed over the theoretical ruins of
revisionism? And such currents are
emerging even within the very heart
of the revisionist "internationals"
themselves !

The arch-revisiomst United Secre-
tariat (which prefers to be known as
"the Fourth International") has al-
ready seen splits from its sections in
Germany, England, Argentina,\ Ceylon
and Belgium. But more serious, in its
teims, is the faclional war exhibited at
its "Ninth World Congress" in early
1969, primarily between the European
groups, whose major force is the
French Ligue Communiste, and its U.S.
political associate, the Socialist Work-
ers Party, between the Ligue's aggres-
sive centrism and the SWP's deepening
reformist impulse.

Livio: an Ersatz "Che"

The key dispute at that Congress re-
volved around the Europeans' draft
resolution on Latin America, whose
thrust was that the U. Sec. itse'f should
seek to initiate guerilla warfare in a
selected country in Latin America. This
proposal was only the logical imple-

mentation of the U.Sec.'s long-time polit-
ical and theoretical capitulation to Cas-
troism. The U.Sec. maintained that
Cuba, after breaking with capitalism
under the leadership of a petty-bour-
geois radical formation, had established
an essentially undeformed workers state
despite the lack of any conscious inter-
vention by the Cuban working class as
a class and without the revolutionary,
leadership of a Trotskyist vanguard
party. Cuba was, according to the U.
Sec, a dictatorship of the proletariat
lacking only the "forms" of workers
democracy, and Castro was "an uncon-
scious Marxist." The Europeans now
propose to extend this pattern to the
rest of the "Third World," and put
• forward peasant guerilla warfare as
the new strategy for the "Fourth In-
ternational." Livio Maitan, the leader
of the Italian section and a main pro-
ponent of this turn, enthused over the
advantages of the "Fourth Internation-
al" having a state of its own to give it
relevance and prestige. And this is per-
fectly logical, for what relevance can
authentic Trotskyism possibly have, for
these revisionists who have at bottom
despaired of proletarian revolution?

Hansen Heads Right Wing
. A minority at the Congress, led by
the SWP's Joseph Hansen, opposed the
proposed turn. Resorting to a rediscov-
ery of "orthodoxy," Hansen maintained
that any form of armed struggle must
be seen as a tactic subordinate to the
building of a Trotskyist vanguard
party. But the Hansen-SWP initiative
in the U.Sec.'s capitulation to Castro-
ism, and the class-collabotationist and
"Third World" nationalist, politics of
the SWP domestically, rev6al the fun-
damentally reformist impulse driving
the SWP to oppose the guerilla warfare
line under the rubric of orthodoxy. Just
as the Communist Parties counter the
confrontationist urgings of impatient
petty-bourgeois radicals with quota-
tions from Lenin opposing adventurism,
for the purpose not of upholding Len-
inism but of practicing reformism, so
the SWP now makes use of its formal
Trotskyist tradition while opposing its
factional antagonists from the right.

The European U.Sec, which competes
with the left Maoists and radical syn-

31

dicalists in the more radical and class-
conscious European milieu, is impres-
sionistically chasing: after a more "left"
line. But the SWP aims at a different
constituency: a base of middle-class
youth recruited on the basis of the
SWP's "success" in building a reform-
ist, single-issue Popular Front against
the Viet Nam war. In the long run, the
SWP's competitors are not the other
erstwhile Trotskyists> nor the Maoist
and semi-Maoist confrontationists, but
the ghost of American social-democracy.

Its Young Socialist Alliance in effect
fills the niche previously occupied by the
YPSL-SP, but is unencumbered by the
letter's arid anti-communism which is
now a detriment rather than an aid to
becoming America's mass reformist
party. With such a perspective, more or
less consciously recognized by at least
a section of the SWP leadership, what
could be more disastrous than to threat-
en its precious legality and respectabil-
ity by the undertaking of anything so
illegal as guerilla warfare?...

Strictly Subordinate to tlie Discipline of OLAS.

- -Our -eatryia^ r2h« into «fl«*ry

iBto Ui P0ltoc8l ^'8******"*^^ ,„ up as us number
a,p«*tus our party is o^hg«i to^t^^^^ ^^^^^^^

one task developing a tecbnicai hp u^pose of

ordinate to the disc.pline of ^^t, pur-

carrying out ^-^'-^-^^f^^, ,^,^Jie fofpol^

ci6n latmoamerlcana y argentma . • ) oositi

Udel anas^WB**"*^ itage oTcofmnental cIvU war would
►^e opened up on our continent similar to the
indochin^Af* npninanio r'Ka'ci ^^^^^^m^

"e opened up on our continent similar to the one on
• ndochinese peninsula. Che's guerrilla struggle would
the beginning of this continental civil war. And like

■whole internaliooa.,

believed

Ut

the
be

And like the:
c had to psrticjipBte

—from Nahuel Moreno, "A Scandalous Document-
A Reply to Germain, " SWP International Internal
Discussion Bulletin, Vol. XI, No. 4, January 1974

iii^ll^^^j;jJ>gV> are not ac-

—from Nahuel Moreno, "La Revolucion
latinoamericana, Argentina y nuestras tareas, ' 1961,
quoted in 'In Defence of Leninism: In Defence of the
Fourth International, " by Ernest Germain, SWP
International Internal Discussion Bulletin, Vol. X No
4, April 1973

With the Government Against the Guerrillas

particularly Vhe maior^ty °^

Ls Moreover. esp°"=*''

coup ^g^^^oliticjii^i-^^'"^

because \t ; \ ^® '■epresm^

"lat io K "workers „ "'^^^ ^e-

be said eJ^e A;^^^ by

worJcpro ^ ^evei roo L °^ pro-

--•from PST/LTF, 'In Reply to the IMT's Open Letter
Number 2, ' SWP International Internal Discussion
Bulletin, Vol. XII, No. 4, October 1975

32

Trotskyism vs. Morenoism on the Popular Front

international Spartacist tendency :

It is the most elementary duty lor revolutionary Marxists
to irreconcilably oppose the Popular Front in the election
and to place absolutely no conlidence in it in power. Any
"critical support" to the Allcndc coalition is class treason,
pav ing the way lor a bloody defeat lor the Chilean working
people when domestic reaction, abetted by international
imperialism, is ready. The U.S. imperialists have been able
to tempori/e lor the moment — and not immediately try to
mobili/e a counter-revolutionary coup on the usual Latin
American model — because they have softened the antic-
ipated nationalization losses through massive profit-taking
over several years.

Within , reformist workers' parties there is a profound
contradiction between their proletarian base and formal
ideology and the class-collaborationist aims and personal

appetites of their leaderships. This is why Marxists, when
they are not themselves embodied in a mass working-class
party, give reformist parties such "cri,tical support" —
against overt agents of capital— as wilTtend to regroup the
proletarian base around a revolutionary program. But
when these parties enter a coalition government with the
parties of capitalism, any such "critical support" would be a
bctra\al because the coalition has suppressed the class
contradiction in the bourgeoisie's favor. It is our Job then to
re-create the basis for struggle wiiliin such parties by
demanding they hrcak with the coalition. This break must
be the elementary precondition for even the most critical
support....

— excerpted from "Chilean Popular Front,"
Spartacist, No. 19, November-December 1970

As Trotsky remarked in 1935: **In reality, the F*opular
Front is ihe main question of Proletarian class strategy for
this epoch. It also offers the best criterion for the difference
between Bolshevism and Menshevism."

The largest purportedly revolutionary organization
formally outside the UP coalition, the MIR (Revolution-
ary Left Movement), was incapable of presenting a class
opposition to the popular front. While attracting a layer of
militant youth fundamentally from the petty bourgeoi!:ie.
and periodically criticizing the Communist Party (CP), the
MIR never broke from the Popular Unity. Following the
September 1970 elections it called on the masses to support
AUende; today the M I R is part of the popular front in exile,
seeking to "broaden" the class-collaborationist coalition by
including even Christian Democrats. The individual
heroism of many MIR militants cannot hide the political
bankruptcy of these Chilean Castroites, the left cover of the
popular front.

Nor did the Chilean disciples of the several self-
proclaimed "Fourth Internationals" present a Trotskyist
policy of irreconcilable hostility to popular frontism. The
sympathizers of the "United" Secretariat (UScc) were
either mired in perpetual "deep entry" in the Socialist Party
(the traditional graveyard for pseudo-Trotskyists in Chile)
or fawningly crawling after the MIR. (In fact, the USec
played a central role in creating the MIR, but this did not
prevent the Castroites from summarily expelling them two
years later for "Trotskyism." Such are the rewards of
opportunism!) The USec supporters labeled the bourgeois
elements of the UP irrelevant, alibiing the AUende regime
with the label "reformist" and calling on it to carry out its
own bourgeois program

—excerpted from: "Declaration of Fraternal Relations
between the international Spartacist tendency and *
the Organizacion Trotsklsta Revolucionaria of
Chile, ' Spartacist, No. 24, Autumn 1977

IVIoreno and tlie PST :

" Nosotros aceptamos que la definicion trotsklsta de los Frentes
Popuiares admite distintas interpretaciones. La que creemos mas
correcta es la que los caracteriza como alianzas entre los partidos
y organizaciones obreras y la burguesia imperialista o sus agentes
en los paises coloniales. Por esc es que, para nosotros, Peron,
Cardenas, el APR A, Castro, la UP Chilena no son Frentes
Populates, aunque scan organismos de colaboracion de clase,
porque todos ellos, en mayor o menor grado, por una u otra via
enlrentaron al imperialismo. Por eso los definimos como
movimientos nacionalistas burgueses o pequeno-burgueses.

De la miSma manera, el Frente Popular con la burguesia
espanola era distinto de un frente de los obreros catalanes con la
burguesia o pequefio-burguesiaseparatistacatalanas. Este ultimo
era un movimiento nacionalista y as! lo definio Trotsky "

"We accept thai the Trotskyisl definition uf the Popular Fronts
permits ilifferent interpretations, the one we think is the most
correct is the one that characterizes them as alliances between
workers parlies and orf^anizalions and the imperialist bourgeoisie
or its agents in colonial countries. That is why, for us, Peron,
Cardenas, APRA [Peru], Castro, the Chilean UP aren't Popular
Fronts, although they may be organisms oj class collaboration,
because all of them to a lesser or greater degree, in one way or
another, confront imperialism. That is why we define them as
bourgeois or petty bourgeois nationalist movements.

"In the same way. the Popular Front with the Spanish
bourgeoisie was different from a front oJ Catalan workers with
the Catalan bourgeoisie or separatist petty bourgeoisie. The latter
was a nationalist movement, which is how Trotsky defined it — "

—from "Carta Abierta a los companeros de Rolitica Obrera," letter from the PST to Politica Obrera, 6
September 1974

33

Pifnidad Popii
tea the shape of a broai
Piratic and agrarian anti-imperiat-^
ist movement with a petty-bourgeois
leadership, in which almost the en-
tire working class, part of the peas-
antry, and important sectors of the
middle class play a principal role.
The undeniable concessions granted
^>.the workers by the Allende 50**:
.:^ve it a bonapartisfe

—from Ernesto
Gonzalez, Unidad
Popular— A March
to Disaster on the
Peaceful Road',"
Revista de America
March-April 1973,
translated in
International
Socialist Review,
October 1973

government shou d not ^ ^^^^
of as just another ^^^logous
ernment, or ^^^^^^^^^^^s

that

; the popular J - ;^„,,,es such
as France or the

the 1940s.

^L J^""^"^^ " ^"""""^ ^orientation), or be ot!
if^ to Have It raising a big hue and cry (the c^rZt^
o»on). The Uruguayan con^rades' opportun'rhat
at least, a weighty rationale: their work against the Frente

of th
that

i^^^^llTSy wty It would indeed be a betrayal to elec-
foraSy support a popular front or a bourgeois nat.on-
alist movement without denouncmg it as
the workers' movement. That is: voting
a tactical and not a principled question

betrayor of
1 itself is for
what Is prin- ,
st be 111 implaea-

cipled is the political policy, and this
Ju dertounce any popular or {'^"^ ^''J*^^^

/iirf ttjorfe «r« ygit^'es tftat promote it

— from Nahuel Moreno, "A Scandalous Document —
A Reply to Germain," SWP International Internal
Discussion Bulletin, Vol. XI, No. 4, January 1974

Trotskyism vs. Morenoism on Proletarian Revolution

international Spartacist tendency :

9. The partial character of the anti-capitalist revolutions
in the colonial world over the past two decades (China,
Cuba, North Viet Nam and North Korea) leads us to
reaffirm the Marxist-Leninist concept of the proletariat
as the key to the socialist revolution. Although existing
petty-bourgeois nationalist-led movements against
imperialism must be defended, the task of communists is
to lead the active intervention of the working class to
take hegemony over the national-social struggle. The
struggle by the proletarian leadership for self-
determination of the oppressed nations is a powerful
tool to break the grip of petty-bourgeois nationalist
leaders on the masses. The Spartacist League funda-
mentally opposes the Maoist doctrine, rooted in
Menshevism and Stalinist reformism, which rejects the
vanguard role of the working class and substitutes
peasant-based guerrilla warfare as the road to socialism.
Movements of this sort can under certain conditions,
i.e., the extreme disorganization of the capitalist class in

the colonial country and the absence of the working
class contending in its own right for social power, smash
capitalist property relations; however, they cannot bring
the working class to political power. Rather, they create
bureaucratic anti-working-class regimes which suppress
any further development of these revolutions towards
socialism. Experience since the Second World War has
completely validated the Trotskyist theory of the
Permanent Revolution which declares that in the
modern world the bourgeois-democratic revolution can
be completed only by a proletarian dictatorship
supported by the peasantry. Only under the leadership
of the revolutionary proletariat can the colonial and
semi-colonial countries obtain the complete and
genuine solution to their tasks of achieving democracy
and national emancipation

— excerpted from: "Declaration of Principles of the
Spartacist League," 1966, in "Basic Documents of the
Spartacist League," Marxist Bulletin No. 9

iVIoreno and tlie PST :

"... la vida ha puesto en evidencia las lagunas, omisiones y
crrores del programa de la Revolucion Permanente — El
dogma de que la unica clase que puede cumplir las tareas
democraticas cs la obrera, es falso. Sectores de la clase
media urbana y cl campesinado son, en ocasiones. los
caudillos rcvolucionarios "

"...life has hroughi oul the omissions and errors of I he
prof^ram of Permanent Revolution — The clognia that
only the working class can accomplish the democratic tasks
is false. Sectors of the urban middle class and the peasantry
are, on occasion, the revolutionary leadership — "

—from Nahuel Moreno, "La revolucion latinoamericana, Argentina y nuestras tareas," 1961, quoted in
"Respuesta de Polltica Obrera al PST," 8 November 1974

34

excerpted from:

"Mexioan
Standoff

—Workers Vanguard,
No. 131, 29 October 1976

Although the presidential elections in
Mexico this sumnoer predictably in-
stalled the candidate of the ruling
Institutional Revolutionary Party
(PRI), Josd Lopez Portillo, they nev-
ertheless had some interesting side
effects. For the first time in decades a
left-wing opposition slate, whose candi-
date (Valentine Campa) is a member of
•the Mexican Communist Party (PCM),
received substantial write-in support.

Moreover, the Stalinist-initiated
ticket included one self-styled Trotsky-
ist party and was supported by two
others, all of them associated with
different factions in the so-called "Unit-
ed Secretariat of the Fourth Interna-
tional" (USec). The sharp three-way
polemic between these groups is of
particular interest since Mexico is the
main arena where representatives of all
the competing international tendencies
in the USec have squared off. . . .

The oldest of the self-proclaimed
Trotskyist groups, however, the Posa-
dista Partido Obrero Revolucionario
(POR), has mainly b^en active in hailing
the "revolutionary government" of
former president Luis Echeverria and
then voting for the PRI's Portillo.
Consequently, the POR has gone
nowhere, and instead since 1972 two
USec-affiliated groups have grown and
managed to gain influence in a segment
of the radicalized students. These were
the Grupo Comunista Internacionalista
(OCI) and the Liga Socialista (LS)
which originated in a 1972splitfrom the
GCL

The GCI was associated with the
International Majority Tendency (IMT)
of the USec led by Ernest Mandel, while
the Liga Socialista was the local affiliate
of the Leninist-Trotskyist Faction
(L-TF) led by the American Socialist
Workers Party (SWP). Characteristi-
cally, the GCI oriented itself toward an
eternal search for a "new mass van-
guard" of Castroite-influenced youth,
and the LS sought to implant itself in a
more sedate academic milieu.

However, beginning last year there
was a spectacular revolt in the LS in
which the pro-SWP leadership was
toppled by agents and supporters of the
Argentine Partido Socialista de los
Trabajadores (PST), up until then the
second major group of the L-TF.
Following the LS split last fall/ winter
the L-TF split internationally as well,
with pro-PST elements heading back
toward the Mandelite majority.

In order to oust what it called the

"Marxist professors" — the pro-SWP
leaders of the LS— the PST-backed
group founded the Militant Tendency
(TM), captured a majority of the Liga,
elected a new central committee and
pushed through new organizational
rules. Under these bizarre regulations,
the membership was re-registered as
candidates for a month's "testing"
period to show their "activism," result-
ing in a classic Stalin-style bureaucratic
political purge. Then, in typical USec
fashion, the deposed leadership, now
calling itself the Bolshevik-Leninist
Faction (FBL), declared itself a "public
faction" and began a fight in the public
press. The TM, denouncing the old
leaders as mired in abstract propagan-
dism, announced it would go to the
masses. ...

PST/TM: Stalinism and Popular
Frontism

For the Militant Tendency, a turn to
the masses meant capitulation before
the Stalinist PCM, the largest left-wing
organization in the country. In mid-
1975 the PCM had held a large rally in
Mexico City at which Communist
leaders called for a "Coalition of Left
Organizations." Almost immediately
after taking control of the Liga Socialis-
ta last fall, the new pro-PST leadership
suddenly published a "joint PCM-LS
electoral program" of 17 points.

It appeared surprising that the PCM
had decided to form a bloc with an
ostensibly Trotskyist party (particularly
since in 1940 the PCM organized an
attempt on Trotsky's life before he was
finally assassinated by a GPU agent).
But the PCM is trying to break out of
isolation and for the moment is appar-
ently willing to take any kind of
electoral bloc it can get.

The more interesting question is why
a so-called Trotskyist tendency should
seek an election agreement with a
Stalinist party. Hasntt the bitter struggle
between Trotskyism and Stalinism over
the past 50 years represented the battle
between class struggle and class collab-
oration—between revolution and coun-
terrevolution? What joint program
could unite such opposites?

With its Mexican allies
organizationally blackjacked by its
international bloc partners, the SWP
counterattacked by asking embarrass-
ing questions about the Militant Tend-
ency's coalition with the PCM. SWP
leader Joseph Hansen wrote a letter (25
October 1975) to the Political Commit-

tee of the Liga Socialista pointing out
that a joint electoral platform would
only serve to mask other differences
PrM "«";P>" he wrote, -does the
PCM stand for the parliamentary road,
lor peaceful coexistence?" (fSWRl
Internal Information Bulletin, March
1976).

The explanation of the TM's oppor-
tunist behavior is that it has nothing to
do with Trotsky^m (nor has the SWP)
and had no qualms about forming a bloc
with the Stalinists. In fact, the TM
reveled in it. On the point which Hansen
worried about — "peaceful
coexistence"— not only did the PCM
support it, but it turned up in the final
version of the joint electoral program
the following January, with of course a
vague pro forma disclaimer by the TM

SWP/FBL: Look Who's Talkingl

The most "orthodox" arguments
against the Militant Tendency's partici-
pation m a popular-frontist bloc have
emanated from the SWP-backed
Bolshevik-Leninist Faction. In an arti-
cle entitled. -Is the Mexican CP No
Longer a Stalinist Organizationr
(translated in Intercontinental Press, I
March 1976). the FBL takes the TM to
task for the statement in the Coalition
election program referring to the -so-
cialist objectives" and -revolutionary
method of the signatories.

The Coalition platform, in fact
openly declared that the Mexican CP is
no longer a Stalinist organization and
has become revolutionary. Challenged
on this by FBL spokesmen, the leader of
the Militant Tendency yelled out to a
TTi^u *^^^'"Pa campaign meeting
that The Communist Party is more
revolutionary than you are!" The TM
newspaper went on:

•^e do not want to cducatethe masses
because then our task would be to

^Trt^^l^ P'**^"'**" °f Marxism.
Our task IS to pose concrete solutions to
concrete problems.... Therefore we
prefer raising a class-struggle proBram
even .f it U not our own. Tnd Tchfeving
JSble. •^"•^^ work mirf
-quoted in [SWP] /„,emai
Information Bulletin, Ju\y 1976
To charges that it had betrayed
Marxism by signing a document calling
for peaceful coexistence," the TM
replied blithely that -foreign policy is a
problem that interests the masses least
now" {ibid.)\

Against this unashamed anti-Marxist
drivel. It is not hard for the FBL to look
orthodox. But the TM was able to land
some telling blows of its own. If the

prbgram of the Coalition of the Left is
really reformist, then the Liga Socialista
(Militant Tendency) should be expelled
from the USec. it pointed out— well
knowing that for the SWP and its allies
to propose this obviously appropriate
step would have meant bringing the
whole shaky USec house of ^rds
crashing down.

Moreover, said TM leader Ricardo
MernSndez. how can they vote for
Campa (as both the LCI and FBL did)
while claiming that the Coalition is
popular-frontist. and consequently
Campa is a candidate -not of a 'class'
organization but of class coUaboration-
»sm ^("Reply to an Essay on Sectarian-
ism, quoted in ibid.). A good point,
since the SWP/L-TF/FBL repeatedly
denounce the IMPs capitulation to
popular fronts, yet then turn around
and themselves vote for popular-front
candidates!

The Mexican situation shows in
microcosm the bitter triangular polemic
now wracking the USec. The fact that
the pro-PST Militant Tendency could
go from L-TF pseudo-orthodoxy on
the popular front into a class-
collaborationist alliance in a matter of a
few weeks tells a great deal about the
reformist character of the L-TF. And
the fact that the most right-wine
grouping (both in Mexico and interna-
tionally) can effortlessly shift from the
mternational minority to accommoda-
tion with the majority speaks volumes
about the unprincipled nature of all the
factions.

Now a new PRT has been bom. at a
lusion conference in the -Miguel En-
riquez Auditorium" at the National
University of Mexico. The 1. 000 people
present at the meeting reportedly named
Mario Roberto Santucho, the murdered
leader of the Argentine PRT/ERP
honorary president of the congress'
Given the ex-Militant Tendency's un-
abashed rejection of Trotskyist opposi-
tion to popular fronts and the TM's
naked Stalinist methods, it is entirely
appropriate that the unification should
take place under the symbolic auspices
of Enriquez and Santucho, two leaders
Of centnst groups set up by the USec
who became renegades. As Santucho
was taking the PRT out of the USec. he
blasted "the Fourth InternatioiLn"
composed of "counterrevolutionary
adventurers" and based on a "scarcely
redeemable tradition." No doubt in
short order we will be hearing similar
words from some of the more intrepid
renegades from Trotskyism in the
Mexican PRT. ...

36

excerpted from:

U.S. Out of
Panama
Now!"

—Workers Vanguard,
No. 203. 28 April 1978

Ltonces

consign*

Si bien somos conscientes del ca-
racter burgues del gobiemo de To-
rnjos, debemos tener presente el
caracter progresivo de su enfrenta-
miento al imperifllismo.

—from Revista de America,
May 1977

With the "far left" groups awakening
mass support with agitation against the
imperialist treaties, the question of the
attitude toward the Torrijos regime
becomes a key issue. In various articles
the LSR and its leaders (including
Miguel Antonio Bernal, who has been
exiled from Panama for the last two
years as a prominent left opponent of the
regime) ha ve made clear that they oppose
giving political support to Torrijos,
although they are put in something of an
embarrassing position because of their
simultaneous sympathies for the Castro
regime which praises the Panamanian
dictator as an "anti-imperialist." How-
ever, another wing of the United Secre-
tariat, grouped around Nahuel Moreno
of the Argentine Partido Socialista de los
Trabajadores (PST), holds that it is
necessary to "support Torrijos in the
current negotiations" (article in the
Colombian Bloque Socialista's Revolu-
cion Socialista No. 66 of 10 March 1977,
reprinted in the Morenoites' Revista de
America of May 1977).

The Morenoites' support for Torrijos
is explicitly political and far reaching.
Elsewhere in the article they call for
"support to the i)ationalist policies of
Torrijos," «ute that he is "the represen-
tative of the struggle for the recuperation
of the canal." This is backed up by the
following analysis:

"Although we are aware of the bourgeois
character cf the Torrijos government,
we must keep in mind the progressive
character of its confrontation with impe-
rialism....

"Thus the fundamental enemy of the
Panamanian masses in this moment is
imperialism and not Torrijos."

This is a Stalinist theory of "revolution
by stages" in its fullest flower. The article
has so many references to the "principal
enemy" that one would think it to be
written by a Maoist.

In a follow-up article (Revista de
America, June-July 1977) the Moreno-
ites characterize Torrijos ^s a "bonapart-
ist sui generis [of a unique kind]" and go
on to say that his regime "confronts
imperialism in a partial <tnd limited
manrier . . . . The ultimate proof of this is
that Torrijos is the first ruler in the entire
history of Panama who denounces the
treaty which handed over the canal and
the canal zone to Yankee imperialisim in
perpetuity.^ This affirmation is particu-
larly ludicrous because the "in perpetui-
ty" clause was eliminated from the canal
treaty in 1936 — in response to nationalist
agitation among the Panamanian
masses— by none other than U.S. impe-
rialist commander-in-chief Franklin D.
Roosevelt. Evidently this indicates that
he is a bonapartist really sui generis.

It is virtually impossible totjilkevenof
pseudo-Troiskyxsm in the case of~lhis
tendency, which holds that in **Bolivia
under Torres, Chile under Allende, Peru
under Velasco Alvarado" it was similarly
necessary to give "critical" political
support to the "bonapartists sui generis"
against the imperialists. The whole
lesson of Chile was that the Allende
popular front paved the way to the
victory of the bloody junta by tying the
workers to the "anti-imperialist" sectors
of the bourgeoisie. Moreno &. Co. do
exectly the same toward Torrijos as the
MIR did toward AllcndcV UP in Chile.

seintcolonUq .^petiatismo. apoj .^^^3^^,

—from Revista de America,
June-July 1977 (see article)

Dirck Halstead

Carter and Torrijos: "a progressive confrontation with

imperialism"?

Moreno the Swindler

The history of Nahuel Moreno's dubious financial
dealings is long and sordid. In the 1960's, funds from a
Peruvian bank "expropriation" by the Tupac Amaru
guerrilla group were supposed to have gotten to Hugo
Blanco's peasant unions via Moreno (Hugo Bressa-
no); they never arrived. The story was spelled out in
detail by Richard Gott in his book Guerrilla Move-
ments in Latin America (1972), but Moreno never
answered the charges. In Argentina there were
allegations against Moreno's PST for refusing to pay
US$19,000 for an order of 50,000 books by Trotsky
printed and delivered by a publishing house (El
Yunque) associated with the Politica Obrera party.

The money still has not arrived.

In Colombia, he set up a publishing house (Editorial
Pluma) with an entrepreneur supplying the cash and
Moreno supplying an international distribution ne-
twork. But when the partner discovered there was no
network and only PST material was being published,
he sued. Colombian PST members were instructed to
buy and distribute Pluma publications on the grounds
that it was a party venture; but when the Proletarian
Democracy Tendency of the PST asked to see the
books, they were reportedly told it was a private
publishing house and they could not have access to
the records.

What about that Money for Hugo Blanco?

Immediately on arrival in Lipia, Martoreil sent Pereyra to
Cuzco to work with Hugo Bianco. Pereyra was to prepare and
organize guerrilla groups, while Blanco was to turn the existing
peasant movement into a more solid, cohesive force.

Some time later Hugo Bressano himself, Hugo Blanco's old
political mentor and the head of SLATO, arrived in Peru from
Argentina. Inpunediately he began discussions with leaders of
various leftist factions. Soon, however, it became clear that there
were serious seeds of discord between the group operating out
of Cuzco which was thinking in terms of organizing a guerrilla
movement, and that of Bressano in Lima which had no intention
of supporting anything further than the seizure of land by the
peasants and the formation of peasant militias to protect their
gains.

The disagreement took the form in the first instance of a
refusal by the Cuzco group to consider meeting with the other
organizers in Lima. Cuzco, they felt, was the obvious site. The
matter was smoothed over by convincmg the Cuzquefios that it
would be worth going to Lima, and eventually Pereyra was sent
down to the meetings held in Lnna m February 1962.

The first major problem to be sdved — indeed the fundamental
problem in the whole effort — was that of raising money. In
December 1961, one of the branches of the Banco Popular was
"expropriated," but all they could secure was 105,000 soles
(about $4000), nearly half of which was in new notes that
could not be used since the police knew the numbers.

SLATO had originally offered a subsidy of eight or nine
million Argentine pesos (about $120,000), but Villanueva doubts
whether anyone took such a large offer very seriously." How-
ever, some time after his arrival in Luna, Hugo Bressano an-
nounced his intention of returning to Buenos Aires with a view
to winding up the accounts of his organization's branch in
Argentina and handing over half a million soles (about $20,000)
to the Peruvian branch as a loan. Bressano arranged that half
of this should be turned over in February 1962, and the rest
not later than 15 March.

Hugo Blanco's need of the money was becoming increasingly
urgent since there were two congresses planned, one of the

peasants of La Convencion and Lares, and the other a peasant
congress of the department of Cuzco. In both of these there was
bound to be a serious clash between the FIR and the Com-
munists. The latter were ahready planning to expel Hugo Blanco
from the Peasants' Federation.

But when it came to the point, no money was forthcoming
from Bressano. On 11 March 1962 Alberto Pereyra had to be
sent down from Cuzco to Lima to secme the necessary funds
from the National Directorate of FIR. The latter, aware that
Bressano had no intention of fulfilling his promise, had already
embarked on planning a second "expropriation" — this tune the
branch of the Banco de Credit© de Miraflores, one of Lima's
most luxurious suburbs. But the plans for this were not yet
ready and in the meantime the organizers in the Cuzco area
were gettiing desperate. At the end of March the Departmental
Directorate of FIR in Cuzco sent an ultimatum to Lima calling
for a National Congress to be held in Cuzco not later than
5 April. If this was rejected, the Cuzco leadership threatened
to take over the National Directorate.

But when this ultimatum reached Lima, it so happened that
Bressano had just returned from Buenos Aires. Immediately he
accused the Cuzco organizers of lack of discipline, and he ordered
that they be expelled from their positions, Hugo Blanco among
them.

Meanwhile, on 1 April, FIR's urban group in Lima had at
last got hold of the car tiiey planned to use in the attack on
the Banco de Credito, and on 12 April the operation took place.
It was a complete success, and the total secured was nearly
three million soles (about $120,000.)

It was decided that half a million soles should be taken to
Cuzco straight away. Three hundred thousand soles were to be
handed over to Bressano, and the rest were left with a Peruvian
in Lima to buy arms.

Apart from the money, a number of important leaders, includ-
ing Pereyra, Martoreil and others, were also scheduled to go to
Cuzco. The problem was how to get them and the money safely
there. After the assault on the bank in Miraffores, all the roads
out of Lima had been closely guarded, and the authorities were
so nervous about rumored uprisings in the Cuzco area that it

38

was practicaUy impossible to get into Cuzco itself without being
searched. The obvious solution would have been to send them
off in ones and twos by different routes, but instead of this,
Bressano decided that they should all go hidden in a lorry.

The Cuzco organizers were firmly opposed to such a mad
scheme, and suggested that the lorry should at least go straight
to the Valley of La Convencion rather than risk entering Cuzco.
And they were extremely hostile to the idea of the money ac-
companying the men. But the SLATO leaders in Lima were
equally firm. Men and money would travel in one lorry to
Cuzco. Villanueva comments caustically:

It appears really as though the leadership of SLATO rather
than finding solutions to problems, took delight in putting the
nerves of militants and leaders to the test, playing unnecessarily
with fire by placing the entire organization in danger and, what is
even worse, jeopardizing the possibilities of the insurrection it-
self."

The words do not seem to be too strong for what subsequently
occurred. On the night of 24 April 1962, a hired lorry set
out from Lima with a hidden compartment holding mne men.
Three days and fifteen police posts later they arrived at Lima-
tambo, within thirty kilometers of Cuzco.

Awaiting them there were a number of the members of the
Departmental Directorate from Cuzco. These proposed a change
of plan. Instead of driving on into the city, the lorry should

stop a couple of kilometers outside and the men should make
their way by separate routes, moving at different hours. But
the chief of the group from Lima refused and the lorry contmued
its journey, arriving in Cuzco at 2 o'clock in the meaning.

Hardly was there time for four of the nine men hidden inside
to disembark before a police patrol suddenly appeared. Pereyra
managed to open fire and he wounded a guard, but he and
another were soon captured. The others managed to get away,
but the police found on Pereyra the sum of 438,000 soles
(about $17,600.)

That same night, 28 April, a few hours after the capture of
the lorry, the surviving leaders from Lima had a meeting with
those from Cuzco to discuss how matters should proceed. Mar-
torell took over from Pereyra, but since Hugo Blanco and two
of his principal assistants had been earUer demoted by Bressano,
another man had to be sent from Lima to take over FIR's Depart-
mental Durectorate in Cuzco.

The night before the lorry had left Lima, Bressano, in an
emotional farewell, said that he would be flying to Cuzco the
next day to take part in the SLATO National Congress that
was to take place there. The next day^ however, saw Bressano
on a plane to Buenos Aires ....

—from Richard Gott, Guerrilla Movements in Latin
America, 1972

The "Arlete Affair" in Portugal

excerpted from:

"CP in Deep
Trouble in
Portuguese
Elections"

—Workers Vanguard,
No. 116, 2 July 1976

What could sharply alter the course of
political events in Portugal is the build-
ing of a Trotskyist party based on
a clear program of class independence,
breaking with all wings of the bourgeoi-
sie, including the demagogic left-talking
officers. A large part of the support for
Carvalho comes from workers disillu-
sioned with the Socialist Party's open
support for and the Communist Party's
:owardly capitulation to Eanes, behind
whose dark glasses there lurks a mono-
cle. A candidate calling for a break with
PS/PCP class collaboration, for no
confidence in the capitalist army, for the
unification of the workers commissions
in a national workers assembly, could
point the way toward breaking through
the vicious circle of "stabilizing parlia-
mentary democracy" vs. military-
dominated "people's power."

In Portugal over the last year the two
main ostensibly Trotskyist organiza-
tions, both allied with the misnamed
"United" Secretariat of the Fourth
International (USec), have tailed after
the CP and SP. During last fall, the LCI
(Internationalist Communist League,
allied with the centrist USec majority
led by Ernest Mandel) was part of the
"Revolutionary United Front" (FUR)
that supported the popular-front Fifth
Government of Vasco Gon^alves and

initially included the Communist Party.
At the same time, as the Socialist Party
was spearheading a reactionary anti-
Communist mobilization, the PRT
(Revolutionary Workers Party, allied
with the reformist USec minority, and in
recent months specifically with the
Argentine PST) incredibly called for a
Scares government.

However, in the presidential elec-
tions, initiaUy neither the Communists
nor the Socialists were running a
candidate (the Pato candidacy was the
result of the PCP's inability to find a
general it could support), so with no one
to tail after the LCI and PRT decided to
launch a joint presidential candidate.
This was also part of on-again, off-again
"unity" discussions between the two
USec sympathizing groups.

Their choice as standard bearer was
one Arlete Vieira da Silva, whose
picture was published on flyers above
the headline: "Arlete, A Woman, A
Worker, A Revolutionary." A bio-
graphical sketch proclaimed that she
had been a member of the PCP for 16
years and was arrested five times, once
imprisoned for more than three years. A
note in the USec international organ,
Inprecor (27 May), went into the details
of torture ("the traces can still be seen on
her broken wrists"). Following the over-

39

throw of Caetano, it said, she resigned
from the PCP in opposition to the
Stalinists' strikebreaking and class
collaboration.

However, three weeks after the
PRT/LCI candidate was launched,
after the necessary 7,500 signatures had
been gathered to put her on the ballot
and on the eve of the deadline for
registration, both groups suddenly
withdrew their support. What hap-
pened? Readers of the PRTs Combate
Socialista (2 June) were given nothing
by way of explanation but an inside
story with the laconic title, "The Only
Candidacy of Class Independence
Ceased to Exist!" This item's only
answer to the "many questions which
have been asked" about the sudden
withdrawal was to refer to "our commu-
niques" on the subject, which are not
printed. "Arlete Vieira da Silva gave us
data about her political past which were
not true," it says, "thereby not guarant-
eeing the political and moral fitness
which a revolutionary party must
demand in order to support a class
candidacy. . . ."

A few days earlier, the LCI had
withdrawn its support from "Arlete,"
declaring that she did "not have the past
nor the minimum conditions which
would permit her to be an intransigent
defender of a program of unity and
independence of the workers move-
ment." Placing the main blame on the
PRT (which had nominated her also in
the April parliamentary elections), the
LCI shamefacedly admitted that it only
belatedly investigated the background
of its "revolutionary candidate." And it
also said nothing about what it had
discovered {Luta Proletaria, 2 June).

The bourgeois press was more reveal-

ing. Expresso (29 May) reported that it
had learned Irom the PRT that inquiries
produced no evidence that its candidate
had ever been imprisoned on political
charges. In fact, the only court trial of
Arlete Vieira da Silva concerned "fail-
ure to pay and embezzlement of various
household electrical appliances"!! In
France, the daily Rouge (30 May),
newspaper of the Ligue Communiste
Rdvolutionnaire (LCR), asked in a
headline whether "Ariete" was. a "Pre-
varicator or Provocateur"?

With the information at our disposal
it is impossible to say whether the
"Arlete affair" was, as the LCI and PRT
suggest, a Stalinist provocation. Cer-
tainly the PCP did not come forward
until quite late with whatever informa-
tion it had concerning the dubious
character of a former member (whose
husband is reportedly a Communist
Party militant), while at the same time
spreading rumors. Moreover, Cunhal &
Co. are no doubt already trying to use
this incident in order to spread their
usual slander that Trotskyists are
provocateurs. What the affair definitely
shows, however, is that in their congeni-
tal tailing after the reformists, the
Pabloist liquidators demonstrate a
fundamental lack of political serious-
ness which leads them to grab for an
unknown quantity as a presidential'
candidate simply because she could
serve as an advertising gimmick to rip
off Communist votes. Their salivary
glands are stronger than their brains,
and it is clear that in presenting Arlete
Vieira da Silva in the elections, the PRT
and LCI gave no thought to providing
serious leadership to the working
masses. . . .

Oe/xou

existir

^ * classei

—from Combate Socialista, 2 June 1976
(see article above)

40

Moreno "Bolshevizes" the Colombian PST

In December 1977-January 1978 the Morenoite
leadership of the Colombian PST expelled 315
members (perhaps half the membership?), including
the PST's presidential candidate Socorro Ramirez, for
forming a tendency and calling for a special conven-
tion of the party. This was the culmination of a
massive purge which began with the May 1977
suspension of former BT leader Ricardo Sanchez and
his subsequent expulsion for "factional activity" and a
disloyal attitude toward the party and its leadership."
According to the Morenoite conception of democrat-

ic centralism, all party leadership bodies must
maintain discipline in relation to the rest of the party,
and hence CCers' discussing differences with rank-
and-f ilers constitutes a violation of party regulations.
In addition, the PST leadership banned all tendencies
and factions except during pre-conference discus-
sion. Moreno's sidekick Eugenio Greco gave credit
where credit is due: "...we learned a great deal from
the SWP. We have always considered it to be our
teacher. Do you know why? Because it ruthlessly
expelled every factionalist."

pi — tt\e mass movement.

when financial reports were financial and jundi

face of a recent action ^«*^J;*_^called on to support the
Committee of tl>e party has ^^^^^^^^^ ^ ^,^and is

pihing house ^:^^^ZT^rres,on<isUSM^s
^^mnletely unacceptable. ^V'^^'' . -^rty from any

mio!f^n.r.c.^\^VP^'^^^^,„^^ri^s. The party ca"
risk of engaging m ^ agents. The idenUfica

only intervene to^'f=''U''Cbeen eonverted into a dea^
"on ot Ptam'» "^fl. ™rtr it ia obvious that we d<

':°iht on the f'^^'^'^'Xl^^mcny of the advenU

-::.n°.\?:^alea&:the^

• ^^^^^^ny demejii^

—from "Declaration of the Proletarian Democracy
Tendency and Counterreport on the Party Regime,"
SWP International Internal Discussion Bulletin, Vol.
XI, No. 2, April 1978

were thrown out of the SWP. Of course, the SWP said We
ItT ""'^""^ 'hat the SWP ta"ght us and k

Thp Paiiefn Am^^

—from December 12, 1977, Report to Central
Committee of the Columbian PST, by Greco," SWP
International Internal Discussion Bulletin, Vol. XV,
No. 2, April 1978

SUBJECT INDEX

SPARTACIST—

Autumn 1972 to Autumn 1980 (Issues Nos. 21-30)

This volume contains the issues of Spartacist
(English edition) published from Fall [Autumn] 1972
(No. 21) through Autumn 1980 (No. 30). Spartacist is
the theoretical organ of the international Spartacist
tendency which is published with varied contents
and frequencies in English, French, German and
Spanish.

From its inception in 1964 until the inauguration
of the monthly Workers Vanguard in October 1971,
Spartacist was the publication of the Spartacist group
(by 1966 the Spartacist League) in the U.S. Beginning
with issue No. 21 in the autumn of 1972, Spartacist
began to be transformed into a journal reflecting
the program and work of the Spartacist tendency
internationally.

Issues Nos. 21 and 22 continued to be published by
the Central Committee of the Spartacist League.
Issues Nos. 23 through 26 were published by the
Interim Secretariat of the iSt. The issue immediately
following the first delegated conference of the iSt in
August 1979 (No. 27-28) was published by the
International Secretariat of the iSt. Beginning with
issue No. 29 (Summer 1980) Spartacist became
the English-language organ of the International
Executive Committee of the iSt and has remained so
to date.

In addition to Workers Vanguard, ihtSLj \i .S. has
from time to time published pamphlets directed
tov/ard particular subjects of immediate concern.
Some of these pamphlets could well have been
published as Spartacists and will be included in the
bound volumes. This volume contains the "Moreno
Truth Kit," published in January 1980. The
"Moreno Truth Kit" was first produced as an offset
pamphlet in October 1979; we have chosen to include
the second edition here because its format more
closely corresponds to that of Spartacist.

GUIDE TO THE SUBJECT INDEX

• The fullest listing is by SUBJECT. Subject headings
are arranged alphabetically. Entries are listed under
subject heads chronologically.

•The numbers following each entry headline give
the issue number, date and page number(s) for the
article. Thus:

The Faces of Economism, No. 21, Fall 1972
(24, 22, 23)

means the title of the article, Issue No. 21, Fall 1972,
beginning on page 24 and continuing on pages 22
and 23.

• No entry is listed twice; see cross references for
guidance in locating the subject head for particular
articles. Cross references are of two types, those
following the word "see" deal centrally with the
subject head; those following the words "see also" are
related articles. Subject heads in cross references are
separated by a semicolon. Thus:

Political Revolution— See China; Maoism; Poland.

means that articles that deal with the question of
political revolution can be found by going to the
subject heads CHINA, MAOISM and POLAND

• Individuals mentioned in articles are usually not listed
separately unless the article is primarily about the
given person. Entries relating to specific countries
are listed under geographical headings. Articles
concerning international political formations are
listed under their organizational names; articles
primarily about a national section of a political
organization are listed under the appropriate country.
General articles about the ostensibly revolutionary
left are listed under LEFT ORGANIZATIONS

• Contemporary studies on historical aspects of the
Marxist movement are listed under HISTORY OF THE
MARXIST MOVEMENT, while historical reprints are
listed under ARCHIVES OF MARXISM.

AFGHANISTAN — See also China; West Germany.

Imperialist Frenzy Over Afghanistan: Hail
Red Army!, No. 27-28, Winter 1979-80 (1-5)

Afghanistan and the Left: The Russian Question
Point Blank. No. 29, Summer 1980 (1-4, 21-28)

Counterrevolution in Afghanistan: The Khomeini
Connection, No. 29, Summer 1980 (5)

ARCHIVES OF MARXISM

From the Archives of Trotskyism: Declaration
of the Internationalist Communists of
Buchenwald, No. 26, Winter 1979 (12-15, 22)

Argentina — See Morenoites.

BRITAIN — See Ireland.

Statement of the Trotskyist Faction, No. 25,

Summer 1978 (17, 18)
Leninist Faction-SL/B Declaration of Fusion,

No. 29, Summer 1980 (18)

CHILE

Class Opposition to Popular Fronts — Key
to Revolutionary Regroupment: Chilean
OTR Fuses with Spartacist Tendency, No. 24,
Autumn 1977 (1-5)

1B]^ 1087-M

Published by: Spartacist Publishing Co., Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116

June 1987

2

SUBJECT INDEX

'Declaration of Fraternal Relations between
the international Spartacist tendency and
the Organizacion Trotskista Revolucionaria
of Chile, No. 24, Autumn 1977 (5-7)

CHINA

Tibet: Mao's Afghanistan, No. 27-28, Winter
1979-80 (14)

Colombia — See Morenoites.

Cuba — See Maoism.
Economism — See Marxism.

Eurocommunism — See United Secretariat.

FASCISM— See also Archives of Marxism.

Labor/Socialist Mobilization on April 19:
1,200 Stop Nazis in San Francisco, No. 29,
Summer 1980 (32, 31)

France— See Left Organizations; OCRFI. See
also Morenoites.

Germany — See Archives of Marxism; West
Germany.

Guerrillaism — See Chile; Maoism; United
Secretariat. See also Morenoites.

HISTORY OF THE MARXIST MOVEMENT

The SWP and the Fourth International, 1946-54:
Genesis of Pabloism, No. 21, Fall 1972 (1,4-13)

The Bolsheviks and the "Export of Revolution",
No 29, Summer 1980 (8, 9, 29-31)

Hungary — See Poland.

INTERNATIONAL SPARTACIST

TENDENCY-See Britain; Chile; Italy; Sweden;
West Germany.

Toward the Rebirth of the Fourth International:
Declaration for the Organizing of an
International Trotskyist Tendency, No. 23,
Spring 1977 (1-4)

Toward the International Trotskyist League!,
No. 27-28, Winter 1979-80 (40, 16-25)

Documents of the First Delegated Conference
of the iSt, No. 27-28, Winter 1979-80 (34-39)

IRAN — See also Afghanistan.

"Down with the Shah! Down with the
Mullahs!": Spartacist Slogan Scandalizes
Fake-Trotskyists, No. 26, Winter 1979
(24, 22, 23)

SWP/USec Criminal Tailism in Iran: HistoryTakes
Its Vengeance, No. 27-28, Winter 1979-80 (8-13)

SWP/HKE: The Blood Is on Your Hands!, No. 29,
Summer 1980 (6, 7)

IRELAND

British Troops Out of Northern Ireland: Workers
Must Crush Sectarian Terror, No. 24, Autumn
1977 (8-16)

Theses on Ireland, No. 24, Autumn 1977 (16-22)
ITALY

Italian LTd'l Joins Spartacist Tendency, No. 30,
Autumn 1980 (24, 22, 23)

LEFT ORGANIZATIONS-See Afghanistan;

specific organizations.

Varga Commission Finishes Work: OCI Slanders
the Dubious Varga, No. 24, Autumn 1977
(32, 26-28)

Draft Conclusions on the Varga Affair Submitted
by the iSt, No. 24, Autumn 1977 (31)

Conclusions of the Commission of Inquiry into
the Varga Affair, No. 24, Autumn 1977 (29, 30)

Open Letters to the Parity Committee, No. 29,
Summer 1980 (10-13)

Lamentable Liaison Committee: The
Anti-Spartacists, No. 29, Summer 1980 (14-17)

Liaison Committee— See Left Organizations.

Mandel, Ernest — See United Secretariat.

MAOISM — See China; West Germany.

"Radical Egalitarian" Stalinism: A Post Mortem,
No. 25, Summer 1978 (6-17)

MARXISM —See History of the Marxist Movement.

The Faces of Economism, No. 21, Fall 1972
(24, 22, 23)

On Bourgeois Class Consciousness, No. 24,
Autumn 1977 (23-25)

MORENOITES — See Left Organizations; United
Secretariat.

Morenoites Call for Counterrevolution in USSR,
No. 27-28, Winter 1979-80 (9)

SUBJECT INDEX

3

Moreno Truth Kit (January 1980)

PART 1

Introduction (2)

Revolution in Nicaragua and the Left (3-8)
OCI/Moreno; Nicaragua Makes Strange
Bedfellows (8-11)

PART 2: Moreno in Argentina, I — From Left
Peronisnn to Social Democracy

Argentina: The Struggle Against Peronism

(12, 13)

Guevarism vs. Social Democracy in the USec
(13-15)

PART 3: Moreno in Argentina, II — Back to
Peronism

PST Caught Redhanded (17-21)

SWP "Translates" Coral (22, 23)

PART 4: Moreno's Left Face (24-29)

PART 5: Opportunist Chameleon Sui Generis
World Trotskyism Rearms (30, 31)
Trotskyism vs. Morenoism on the Popular Front
(32, 33)

Trotskyism vs. Morenoism on Proletarian

Revolution (33)

Mexican Standoff (34, 35)

U.S. Out of Panama Nov\/! (36)

PART 6; Moreno the Swindler
What About That Money for Hugo Blanco?
(37, 38)

The "Arlete Affair" in Portugal (38, 39)
Moreno "Bolshevizes" the Colombian PST (40)

Nicaragua — See Morenoites.

OCRFI — See Left Organizations; Morenoites.

Letter to the OCRFI and the OCI, No. 22,
Winter 1973-74 (32, 28-31)

Pabloism— See History of the Marxist Movement;
United Secretariat; West Germany.

Parity Committee — See Left Organizations.

Peru — See Morenoites.

POLAND

A Workers Poland Yes! The Pope's Poland No!,

No. 30, Autumn 1980 (2-5)
Polish Social Democrats Arm in Arm with Clerical

Reaction: All the Pope's Dissidents, No. 30,

Autumn 1980 (6-8)

SWP 1956 vs. SWP 1980: "Pure Democracy" or
Political Revolution in East Europe, No. 30,
Autumn 1980 (10-16)

Political Revolution — See Ctiina; Maoism; Poland.

POPULAR FRONT— See Chile. See also
Morenoites; Sri Lanka.

Reply to Our Critics: No "Critical Support" to
Popular Frontism, No. 27-28, Winter 1979-80
(26-31)

Not a Tactic But "The Greatest Crime",
No. 27-28, Winter 1979-80 (32, 33)

Portugal — See Morenoites.

Religion — See Afghanistan; Iran; Poland.

Russian Question — See Afghanistan; China;
Poland.

Socialist Workers Party — See History of the Marxist
Movement; Iran; Poland; United Secretariat. See
also Afghanistan.

Soviet Union — See Afghanistan; History of the
Marxist Movement; Poland.

Workers Vanguaril
Bound Vfilumes

Vol.

1

WV Nos. 1-34
Nov. 1970-Dec. 1973

Vol.

9

WV Nos 205-221
12 May-15 Dec. 1978

Vol.

2

WV Nos. 35-58
Jan. -Dec. 1974

Vol.

10

WV Nos. 222-246
5 Jan. -28 Dec. 1979

Vol.

3

WV Nos. 59-89
Jan. -Dec. 1975

Vol

11

WV Nos. 247-270
11 Jan.- 12 Dec. 1980

Vol.

4

WV Nos. 90-114
2 Jan. -18 June 1976

Vol

12

WV Nos. 271-295
2 Jan. -18 Dec. 1981

Vol

5

WV Nos. 115-138
25 June- 24 Dec. 1976

Vol.

13

WV Nos 296-320
8 Jan. -31 Dec. 1982

Vol

6

WV Nos. 139-162
7 Jan. -17 June 1977

Vol

14

WV Nos. 321-344
14 Jan. -16 Dec. 1983

Vol

7

WV Nos. 163-186
24 June-23 Dec. 1977

Vol

15

WV Nos. 345-369
6 Jan. -21 Dec. 1984

Vol

8

WV Nos. 187-204
6 Jan. -5 May 1978

Vol

16

WV Nos 370-393
11 Jan.- 13 Dec. 1985

Vol. 17 WV Nos 394-418
3 Jan. -19 Dec. 1986

.00 PS"" volume Order from/make checks payable to;
Spartacist Publishing Co.. Box 1377 GPO, New York. NY 10116

$20

4

SUBJECT INDEX

SPAIN

Letter to the Spanish Liga Comunista,
No. 23, Spring 1977 (5-13, 21)

SRi LANKA

Suppressed Documents Expose United

Secretariat: The Case of Bala Tampoe, No. 21,

Fall 1972 (14-21)
The Struggle for Trotskyism in Ceylon, by

Edmund Samarakkody, No. 22, Winter 1973-74

(1-24)

USec Covers Up Tampoe Scandal, No. 22,
Winter 1973-74 (25-27)

1964: Samarakkody vs. the Popular Front,

No. 27-28, Winter 1979-80 (19)
Popular Frontism vs. the Tamil People,

No. 27-28, Winter 1979-80 (20)

Stalinism — See Afghanistan; History of the

Marxist Movement; Maoism. See also Poland;
United Secretariat.

SWEDEN

Swedish USec Face to Face with Trotskyism,

No. 25, Summer 1978 (32, 25, 26)
Statement of Resignation from the KAF, No. 25,

Summer 1978 (26-29)

Reply to the KAF Political Bureau, No. 25, Summer
1978 (29-31)

Tibet — See China.

Trotskyist International Liaison Committee — See
Left Organizations.

UNITED SECRETARIAT-See Iran; Sri Lanka;
Sweden; West Germany. See also History of the
Marxist Movement; Morenoites; Spain.

The Road from the SWP to Trotskyism, No. 21,
Fall 1972 (2-4, 13)

The Fight in the United Secretariat: Reformist
Appetite vs. Guerrillaist Centrism, No. 23,
Spring 1977 (14, 15, 17-20)

Declaration of the Revolutionary Internationalist
Tendency, No. 23, Spring 1977 (15, 16)

SL Confronts USec Leader on U.S. Tour-
Ernest Mandel: A Centrist for All Seasons,
No. 25, Summer 1978 (1-5, 19-24)

Eurorevisionists Tail Stalinist Breakaways,

No. 26, Winter 1979 (2-9, 18-21)
Rotten Blocs Shatter United Secretariat,

No. 27-28, Winter 1979-80 (6, 7)

Tamara Deutscher Resigns as Sponsor of
USec-Backed Journal, No. 29, Summer
1980 (27)

Revisionists on the Dictatorship of the Proletariat:
Eurotrotskyist Mandel vs. Caudillo Moreno,
No. 30, Autumn 1980 (17-22)

United States — See Fascism. See also Afghanistan.

Varga Commission — See Left Organizations.

WEST GERMANY

Spartacusbund Expels Left Opposition:
Trotskyist Faction Fuses with TLD, No. 23,
Spring 1977 (24, 22, 23)

"Fragile Unity" in German USec: Where
Pabloism Has Led the GIM, No. 26, Winter 1979
(10, 11, 16, 17)

Afghan Ultra-Rightists, Maoists Seal
Anti-Soviet Bloc in Blood: Attempted Murder
of German Spartacist, No. 27-28, Winter
1979-80 (5)

Workers Socialist League — See Britain; Left
Organizations.

ISPARTAOSTI

Bound Volumes

English Edition: issues 1-20
February 1964— July 1971

German Edition: issues 1-10
Spring 1974— Winter 1981-82

The first bound volume of Spartacist, English edition,
encompasses the compiled public propaganda,
including supplemental reprints, of our tendency
from its expulsion from the SWP in 1964 to the
establishment of Workers Vanguard in 1971 . The first
bound volume of Spartacist, German edition,
includes documents key in the formation of the
Trotzkistische Liga Deutschlands, as well as
translations of articles from Workers Vanguard and
Spartacist, English edition.

Order from/make checks payable to: $25.00
Spartacist Publishing Co. Each
Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116, USA Volume